Breakfast at Tiffany's

"Never love a wild thing, Mr Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A Hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing : the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up. Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing, You'll end up looking at the sky."

---

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words :  an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendships's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments. Frequently, when he was out of town (I'd developed hostile attitudes toward him, and seldom used his name) we spent entire evening together during while we exchanged less than a hundred words ; once, we walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns and stole a box of joss sticks then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs or burning skyline, she said : "Years from now, years and years one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazilian brats. Because yes, the must see this, these lights, the river -- I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it." And I said : "Do shut up," for I felt infuriantingly left out (...) 

So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, automnal, all alike as leaves : until a day unlike I ever lived.