`` a pattern that continued with the always-clad-in-black katherine xiv , who i met that spring when she came up to me at a coffee shop and asked if i was reading camus , which i was , and i said i was , and then she asked if i had ever read kierkegaard , and i said i had because i had , and then by the time we left the coffee shop we were holding hands and her phone number was in my brand-new cell phone , and she liked to take me for walks on the lakeshore , where we 'd watch the waves crashing against the rocks on the shoreline , and she said there was only one metaphor , and that the metaphor was water beating against rocks-because , she said , both the water and the rocks ended up worse off in the bargain , and then when she dumped me in the same coffee shop where we 'd met three months before , she said she was the water and i was the rocks and we were just going to keep going at each other till there was nothing left of either of us-and when i pointed out that , really , water does n't suffer any negative effects whatsoever from slowly eroding the rocks on the lakeshore , she allowed as to how that was true but dumped me anyway .