I feel like everybody gets a mixed bag. You have this bag and you have to sort through it. And there’s great stuff and there’s horrible stuff. It’s just that a lot of people know a lot of what’s in my bag. And I can’t say that I’m not sad, I can’t say that those things aren’t true and that people making those correlations to events and actuality, but I try – because I have no choice, because I have a child – to make something out of it. To make something out of us. To literally remake it. Yes, I am sad. I’m sad as often as I’m happy. And so is everybody I know.

Do you think there was a part of you that imagined the two of you would somehow end up together?

Immediately, I wish that I hadn’t. The look on her face—a kind of juddering visceral alarm at what has been said…I don’t wish to see that look many more times in my life. “That would make me way too sad to answer,” she says quickly, and I hurriedly begin another question, about something completely different, hoping that if I say it fast enough these new words will chase the old words away from where they are hanging in the air between us, and maybe she will let me pretend that it was something I never said.

“No, no,” she says, and I can see the tears forming, and I think she means that she doesn’t want to answer any more questions about anything. I mutter some kind of apology under my breath.

But, even now, I’m wrong about everything. Mostly she is just trying to stop my new question. She has something to tell me.

“No,” she says. “I said it would make me too sad to answer but it’s also…”—and she nods even as her voice breaks once more with tears—”…one of my favorite things to imagine.” And through the tears, a beaming, almost beatific smile stretches room-wide across her face. “It’s actually one of my favorite places to visit.”

you always hurt the ones you love

“My poor mom really wants me to meet someone. I think she wanted to believe the Ryan Gosling rumor more than anybody.”  

            - Michelle Williams about rumored romance with Ryan Gosling

You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall

“I ask her why she thinks they were so drawn to each other. (A long pause follows. All the pauses will be long from now on.)

“There’s an answer that I know,” she says, “but I don’t want to say.” She talks around this not-saying for a while, then says, “Our initial meeting, the circumstances of how we first met, were cosmic or something.” They were together through the shoot, and soon she was pregnant. “Yeah, a lot of things happened at once,” she says. “It’s a bit like: We had a lot of things to do, because we didn’t have a lot of time, or something. [x]”