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Zachary Fuller's avatar

Hey man this offered a new perspective for me. Thank you.

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Stefan Baciu's avatar

Loved the essay! I do want to offer a small observation that might help illuminate the middle of the love affair between Grady Cole and Alejandra. I don’t believe it’s something inexpressible, or something literature has yet to articulate. Rather, it’s that a love affair—truly shared between two people—is a kind of divine mystery. We can describe what they do, how they move, what they think. But the thing itself—that luminous, burning center—is only ever approached apophatically, through what it is not.

I believed it because I’d lived something similar—an experience that made the story feel deeply familiar. And yet, just as I could never fully grasp what passed between Grady Cole and Alejandra, I can barely make sense of that episode from my own youth.

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