But her entry into the relationships was always a rejection of her own ways—to know and to experience more of the other person—taking on shadow selves that she inhabited for stretches at a time.

I cannot say that we felt familiar, only that we wanted to become familiar, and so we accepted the city’s ways. Besides, we’d always known that wherever we lived would require us to change. There was no place where we could feel at ease, no language that, after so many years, we could sink into like a deep sleep.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.

I’m having the best day, Manu said. Over dinner, he posed to me his most hypothetical questions: What sort of farmers would we be? Which historical period? Astronaut or deep-sea diver? The questions made me feel that I couldn’t survive a day in the world. I wouldn’t be able to grow anything to eat, couldn’t live through a war or plague, would get

It’s not the drinking, Ravi said. It’s the drinking spirit. Someone with a drinking spirit, he explained, was a person who, when offered another round, would not refuse by making a point of their individual needs. Regardless of whether or not they were drinking, they’d welcome the continuation of the evening. This was one of the most important

was one of the aspects of our lives we still needed to bring into focus, so that we could better picture a future home. The process was an act of imaginary acrobatics, trying to launch ourselves forward, with only a guess of where we wanted to land.

There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options. But just now, I preferred not to think about it too much.

This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something of them—a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product.

Tereza’s apartment was grand, with the old-fashioned luxuries of real homes. Plenty of armchairs and blankets, sets of china for different occasions, wicker baskets. Things that could not be bought wholesale, in a hurry. I wanted to understand how such a place came into being, whether the acquisition of any of these objects had been an event in