It is true that neither of us had any game. It is also true that this wasn’t the point. The point was that we both understood how easy it is to let your life pass along, totally in book, unless you take a risk, disrupt the expected patterns, and try to make something human happen.

I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?

I long for a conversation partner who travels through an abundance of interesting material at breakneck speed, shouting over their shoulder at me, “Keep up!” Someone who assumes I am up for the challenge, someone who assumes the best of me.

Here, in my late thirties, I want to learn his nature-slowness. This, for me, is a change. It is the opposite of the kinds of drama that used to make me feel reassuringly alive. But I think I’m finally getting it. This kind of living isn’t the absence of story or of life. It’s just a story happening so slowly you can’t really see it taking place.

I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on

I didn’t leave when he said that the woman he had cheated on me with had told him over the phone that she thought it was unfair that I didn’t want them to be friends anymore. I didn’t leave when he wanted to invite her to our wedding. Or when, after I said she could not come to our wedding, he got frustrated and asked what he was supposed to do

Both characters change along the way, and both characters absolutely need each other. And so, what Chris Carter taught me about love (Mr. Carter, please find, herewith, my therapy bills) is that the very best, and sexiest, and truest kind of boning there is, is the kind where two very different kinds of people find a mode of working together—of

The sun ducks beneath the tide line in one last orange snap and we clap for it. For the fucking sun. We are those people. And who isn’t, really. We’ve got one more lap in, after all. We should be so lucky.

There is a kind of clock of fertility that many women are aware of, and mine is a kind of Schrödinger’s clock. It is possible, for example, that my clock has already run out, and it is too late for me to use my body to make a child. Or it is possible my clock is still ticking along. The fact of my not knowing used to be a thing that plunged me into