Old Flame

We were each alone with our own pros and cons, zooming toward our cubicles, where we would labor for the next eight hours, shoving our personal baggage waaaay down, swallowing it when it rose in our throats like more vomit, so we could email, email, email until seven in the evening, at which point the sun would have lowered behind the tall building

It had occurred to me on more than one occasion on this trip that Megan was a very wonderful friend. The points at which this realization struck me were the points where I felt Megan was reading my mind, like when she took that dress down from the hanger in the window, or like now, when I could tell she sympathized with my predicament, even empathi

“Damn,” I said. I thought about how Megan and I, according to the lifestyle marketing biographies the sales team had invented, were “Style Eccentrics,” meaning that they could not predict our shopping habits. One day we would buy a coat at the Goodwill and the next day a Chanel blouse. We were unfavorable as consumers, impossible to pin down, and I

It was impulsive, but I trusted impulse—probably more than I should have. Impulse, to me, felt honest: the thing you would do if you didn’t think through all the reasons you shouldn’t.

I knew then why Megan had fallen for him in the first place. It was this, this kind of attention paid, these kinds of questions, questions nobody asked these days, as everyone hustled to keep up with everyone else, their eyes on their own prize. What did you think you’d be? What do you really want? Who are you, actually, under all the pretenses you

“Kasper is an amazing musician,” Wes said. I noted how easy it was for Wes to give compliments, remembering how he’d praised the writing of Zoe’s friend at the park. It took a certain kind of confidence to be so free with flattery, and also a touching kind of devotion.

Of course Wes was a sandwich thrower. He probably opened beer bottles with his keys, took stairs two at a time, slid down banisters. Despite his smallish stature and elegant collarbone, he seemed manly to me in this particular way: that understanding of physical objects in space, and of himself in relationship to those objects.