Chance

Twisting and turning beside my slumbering Tereza, I recalled something she had told me a long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation. She had been talking about my friend Zack when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him." Even now, her words leave me in a strange state of melancholy, and now I realize it is only a matter of chance that Tereza loves me and not my friend Zack. Apart from our consummated love, there are, in the realm of possibility, and infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.

I rejected out of hand the idea that the love of my life my be something light or weightless; I presumed that love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.