Cio Rose

“He would be all right, I thought again, comforting myself by thinking it, though I thought too that he wasn’t altogether mistaken in what he had said, that there would be loss in loving another, that the perspective that limited his grief would also limit his love, which, having taken the measure of its bounds, he could never again imagine as boundless. And I had thought this before, too, how much we lose in gaining this truer version of ourselves, the vision I had urged upon my student, the vision it was my obligation to urge, though it carried us away from our dreams of ourselves, from the grandeur of novels and poems which it was also my obligation to impart. How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness