The Anthropologists

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn’t quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn’t want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

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.

In Tereza’s presence, the world seemed less urgent. The poems cleared out spaces in us and filled us with their shapes. Sitting around the table, I felt that we should try and live like this, reassembling the world in poetry, where things were a little lopsided.

This was one reason why I found it difficult to imagine my life as a parent; I contemplated every action and routine, wondering whether it was the right one for me.

There was also the sense that we were merely checking up on each other while I was away on a long trip, and that we would fill in the details once I returned.

We never allowed our parents their unhappiness, I said, and we never allowed them their individuality, before they were shackled to parenthood.

Life and Death All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over. We lived with the abstract shape of the news, informing us that it had arrived. We lived with the imaginary shock. Maybe, I thought, it would also be a relief: Here it was

My grandmother had a way of confusing perspectives during conversations, the small and the big, the faraway and close by. She might not know the new developments in our lives—that I had received a grant, that we were looking for an apartment to buy—but she would ask what we’d made for dinner the previous day or whether I had taken down my winter cl

Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life.