The day after Valentine’s I saw someone who reminded me of a friend I’d loved, on a run down the street. It wasn’t that they looked alike, necessarily; I wasn’t close enough to glimpse his face, and anyway he was running away, far ahead; just that he had legs in black shorts. In late winter the gray dim is filled with ghosts, doppelgangers, deja vu. I see S. from political science across the street at 10 AM, I see him at the same intersection at 5 PM, salt-and-pepper hair and white earbuds, he doesn’t see me. I don’t like myself today so it feels natural, not having company on this walk. Speaking fills me with a revulsion for myself, but I do it anyway. (Do you ever have days like that?) I run into G. from the law school. He’s carrying a big brown box. He’s been online shopping. I ask him if it’s something he’ll return. I’ve stopped and he’s walking away as he answers, No I’m keeping this, I’m not fucking crazy, maybe there’s something else I don’t catch, I don’t have the context then for why it would or wouldn’t be fucking crazy to return it. Later I find out it’s a very expensive coat. I see a photograph of my housemate trying it on, she looks beautiful. I want a long and beautiful wool coat but don’t need one. R. has a beautiful designer coat that makes him look like the hardboiled detective in a film noir movie, and a down-stuffed parka with real coyote fur trim on the hood. My parka is a hand-me-down from my sister, stuffed with 50% goose down and 50% polyester. The reflective lining made one professor call it my space age coat. When I slough it off indoors, I feel like I am shucking off a small person who has been riding everywhere on my back. Why is it so hard to send emails? From the thirteenth floor window, the headstones in the cemetery across the street look like black graphite smudges on the snow.
image: Quit, 1967, gunpowder and colored pencil on paper, Ed Ruscha
read Emily Gould’s piece about almost divorcing her husband; it’s a brilliant and (to me) tear-jerking meditation on marriage, love, ambition, and gender. I had to put it down when I was reading it on my phone in a crowded cafeteria because the paragraph that begins with My husband would have to forgive me broke my heart.
Mary Gaitskill’s piece in the New Yorker on friendship! Below is the passage my friend A. highlighted. I wonder who I envy for are and who I envy for do and which relationships complicate the line.
