It was always like this in life. No one ever had the right reaction to anything.

“Divorce only reinforces the supremacy of marriage!” I complained to Jordi as we drove to the gallery where her headless women would be exhibited; she was worried about the floor plan. “You’re either married or you’re not, it’s a binary. Whereas if marriage is important but not the organizing principle, then it can keep changing, the way the parent

I laughed, no. Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.

“More hormonally one-note,” Jordi said, referring to the graph. “Imagine what it feels like to be a man. No cycles. No deaths-within-life. No transformation from one kind of person into another.”

I’d thought the two paths were: sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untether

Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot. I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my cur

Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holdin

The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.

No one would guess that instead of going to New York for two and a half weeks I had hidden out thirty minutes away with a boy who worked at Hertz. That would be an absurd conclusion to jump to.