What we talk about when we talk about love

             L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

             He said, “I just want to say one more thing.”

             But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

This is the ending Raymond Carver's editor forced on him, after cutting a romantic, lingering, uncertain five paragraphs off the end. One of which was this:

It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn’t place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this ... except that I like the idea of radically cutting even vaguely good paragraphs. 

Or maybe it's this - I like the desolate feeling you get after too many Raymond Carver stories, like everything has been stripped of its meaning. Maybe that's liberation (at least for the writer).