Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment.

How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over

How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was?

Why was I so susceptible to flights of fancy, my perception of other people’s views of me?

The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.

But now at thirty-eight, my time was beginning to run out. I still didn’t want a child. I didn’t know what I would do with a child if I had one. But I missed having that open space before me in which to decide.

Annika and I rarely ever saw each other, although I had promised for many years to take a trip to the beach. I couldn’t get Jamie’s and my schedules to align, couldn’t get him interested, and I was afraid to go alone—to be intimate with her—without him as a buffer. I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too.