Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words

In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words

I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words

Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD

4. The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS

5. Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words

I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR

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There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.

“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”

A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.

The boyfriend and relationship were my first, an imperfect test-run whose flaws I had discovered early on. But for years, I’d had a bad habit of cutting people off instead of dealing with the conflict; I was determined to stick it out, no matter how much it hurt. “So you think you and him are in it for the long haul?” the Editor wrote, late one evening in September. “Kids, house, the whole thing?”

“Yes,” I wrote back, because that was what I had taken up saying — that I wanted to be with my boyfriend forever. “Then so it will be,” the Editor replied from his side of town, putting his children to sleep or pouring his wife a glass of water or wine. Then so it will be is what you say to young people, whether five or 25, who believe things you know not to be true; then so it will be is a kind of grace.

To: The Editor
Subject: re: re: re: so
Message: Half of what makes me me is the audacity to do certain things; the other half is the sense not to.

I kept thinking about how much simpler things would have been if I were still a virgin. It hadn’t been that long ago — the inevitable impasse all my early relationships had come to because of it. Instead, he and I had before us the specter of sex, the will-they-won’t-they that had hung over boy-girl relations since time immemorial. Will they? I wondered when he told me about the Rumspringa from his marriage he’d been granted several years prior, after his second child was born — apparently, the point at which many men realize they’re fucked. Will they? I wondered, when I wrote that I’d been texting all day, and he asked why I hadn’t sent him any. Because you don’t have my number, I thought. Because I know how these things begin and we have already begun. Will they? I wondered, every time he made note that his wife and children were out of town. Will they? I wondered when I touched myself and his face was the face that sprang up.

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The finest romances have the messiest stories. Not messy as in poorly written; au contraire, a good romance hits all the highest points of storytelling  — the meet cute, the ecstatic joy of turning enemies into lovers, the inevitable wrench in the works, middles full of will they-won’t they tension, and a resolution that’s either a happily ever after, happy enough for now, or a bittersweet goodbye.

I am feeling particularly entranced with the genre right now having just watched La La Land. Okay, look — it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. But me? I love a good musical. I love a good homage. And I love a good love story. The prospect of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone maybe not ending up together because of the calls of their differing careers, but agreeing they will always love each other … well, let’s just say I needed several moments. 

My husband is a working musician, and I’m a writer. This May, we will have been together for 16 years — eight in sin, eight married, and all 16 sharing creative careers that don’t always align. Ours has been a romance of nights apart, beautiful Sundays together, opposite schedules, and ships passing in the night. 

There is a montage in La La Land that shows this all-too-familiar lifestyle of two artists — Gosling lands a big gig and is gone nights, while Stone is wrapped up in writing her one-woman play, rising early and going to bed early, so over the course of their days they end up sharing only bed space. This is the moment I shout to my husband, in the bedroom preparing for his Friday night gig: “Oh shit, La La Land just got too real.” 

I go to the bedroom and tell him about the scene. He listens to me, buttoning his shirt and smiling his sad smile. We agree that his current Friday and Saturday night gig schedules are not ideal. He wraps me in a hug and we stand there, as I watch the time on our alarm clock over his shoulder. He is late.

That image of a long-haul couple eating breakfast together, sharing a morning coffee, splitting a bottle of wine after a long work day, reading books together in bed before falling asleep in each other’s arms — that has never been our reality. Do I wish it was? Certainly. But he will never ask me to give up my writing, and I will never ask him to stop playing music. The messier our lives, the more years we have together, the more we realize the value of writing our own story. Will we, won’t we make it? We’ll just have to wait and see. 

This is where the great, messy love stories come in handy — I don’t need our marriage to look a certain way to have hope. Because if I’ve learned anything from these stories, it’s the messiness, not the ideal, that strengthens a relationship. Our marriage survives because we appreciate the possibility that it may not. 

So don’t give me any of that happy ending bullshit. Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love. 

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage (Mary H.K. Choi, GQ Magazine, March 2021)

Anyone who has actually experienced marriage knows that the saying “marriage is bliss” is woefully incorrect. Not because marriage is about petty arguments or seeing sides of your spouse you’d rather not see (think the Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a nudist and then opines on the difference between “good naked” and “bad naked.”) The truth of the matter is that marriage is a little bit of good naked and a whole lot of bad naked, especially during a pandemic when fears run high and aging in-laws who live across the country are deteriorating. 

Choi’s essay takes a singular comment from her husband and encapsulates it as a defining “bad naked” moment in their marriage. And, as she says, “I have never loved him more than in that moment.” As someone who has had her share of “bad naked” marriage moments, I can attest that this essay rings with glaring honesty. 

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless. Bodies are a constant fucking betrayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply affecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-sufficiency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport. I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (Stephanie Clifford, ELLE, December 2020)

Just stick with me on this one. We all remember that one guy, Martin Shkreli, who became universally known as the biggest asshole on the face of the earth for raising the price of a life-saving pharmaceutical by 5,000% overnight. Top this objectively awful-for-humanity move with his love of trolling, his shit-eating grin, and his obscenely expensive purchase of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album — because of course, a Wall Street Bro would spend an inordinate amount of money on that. Now add in a journalist who is damn determined to humanize him. Or is she also being trolled? 

I’m not saying this story is a great love story. But it will enrage you, confuse you, and make you question the patriarchy. (In a follow-up, Smythe, the journalist, insists she is acting of her own accord and that it is sexist to imply that she is in any way a “victim.”) Is she being used by the Pharma Bro to recoup his image? Is she using him to get a big-money book deal? Are they actually in love? Or has she, in the words of one of her journalism professors, ruined her life? Settle back with some popcorn for this one. 

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. 

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Tinder Hearted (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, August 2022) 

God, there are so many good lines in this one, it’s difficult to figure out what I want to highlight the most. Davis, a wickedly funny writer, recounts her decade of Tinder dating and how the longest relationship she’s managed to be in from it is with Tinder itself. She downloads, has great sex, has terrible sex, falls hard with men who ghost her, ghosts men who fall hard for her, deletes the app, tries traditional dating, and re-downloads it again and again in a vicious but unrelenting circle of who gives a shit. As one of the “smug couples” who “sigh with relief when they say, ‘I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps,’” let me just say … I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps, but part of me has always wondered what it would be like to have the world as your sexual oyster in the way Tinder allows, delicious or rotten as it may be. If romance is messy, then Tinder romances take the cake. What is most apparent: Davis has a wealth of great stories to tell. 

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I’d heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I’d told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. “Look!” I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn’t mention that at this early point in the app’s history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on — quickly and not via app — to a woman he’d met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

Taking The Knife* (Randa Jarrar, Gay Mag, October 2019)

“In kink, consent is queen,” thus you need to understand what you’re going to get into before you read this essay. The piece centers around Jarrar’s visit to a queer kink club where the first thing we see/read is Mx. Cele enjoying a knife in intimate spaces. At the club, everyone is asking permission to touch, taste, and harm. It’s a mind warp to think of harm and consent working with, not against, each other in the same sentence, but that is what this entire essay does. I loved it for its deft balancing act — the daily negotiations of asking for what we want, not being asked before something is taken, and the sexual freedom and safety of owning our own bodies in a culture that feels entitled to it.  

I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house. The last time I was abused, I was sixteen years old, and my father chased me around the house with a knife. I ran outside and he came after me. I ran back inside, and he finally put the knife down. But afterwards, I called the police. I’ve written before about what happened when the police came- how I smoked a cigarette with the cop who drove me to the station; how that cop later told me that my father being Arab would be a problem. I understood that this meant it would be a problem for my mother, and for me. I dropped the charges against him a few weeks later. But that didn’t change that I had been very afraid of my father and very afraid of that knife.

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, Matter, October 2015)

And to round out this reading list, I have for you a beautiful love story. Not traditional, definitely fluid, but more romantic than most of the other narratives out there. Boy, born biologically female, meets girl, born biologically male. It’s love at first sight. They throw caution to the wind to be together in the most honest way they can — genderqueer, fluid, trans, and finally, the first queer couple legally married in the state of Texas. Grab your tissues for this one. (And for you journalism nerds out there, enjoy a conversation in the comments about the editorial choices in names and pronouns as one character, Johnny, transitions over the course of the piece.) 

Now that there is marriage equality, they want to get married again, with a license that better reflects who they are — not husband and wife — but partner and partner. “When you give sexual consent, you cannot give a blanket consent at the beginning of an evening or for the rest of your life,” Johnny explains. “And we feel the same way about marriage.” So they continue to propose to one another nearly every day. Once Johnny fingered the question into the soot on Ashley’s back windshield. Just last month, Johnny wrote, “Will you marry me?” “Yes” and “No” in backwards cursive in different places on their body so that Ashley could snuggle up to her answer, letting it legibly transfer onto her skin. They write it in each other’s notebooks and songbooks to discover who knows how long later. With each proposal, they affirm their love and devotion to their partner in their current identity. For they know more than anyone else how fluid one’s identity can be.

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

In this immersive piece for Outside, Mark Sundeen writes about his last two decades spent living in a trailer in Moab, Utah. An English major from San Francisco, when he first arrives in the “sweltering hamlet” Sundeen finds himself in awe of the rugged characters he meets. Ashamed of his own bookishness, he seeks to hide it and emulate their qualities, to become “the sort of man who is competent with chains and repairs, rough roads and icy curves.” He also finds himself drawn to the new type of women he meets, none more so than Wendy. Sundeen develops an obsession for the former rancher that lasts for years, to the detriment of other relationships. Sundeen describes his romantic history with great self-awareness, painting a vivid picture of the women in his life, as well as the arid atmosphere of the Moab desert that forms a backdrop to his personal development.

The upshot of seeing Wendy was that when I moved back to Moab in that summer of 1999, age 28, she rented me the trailer for $300 a month. I wouldn’t trouble her with complaints but would do any repairs myself.

I woke each night at 3 A.M. with my lungs clenched and visions of Q in my head. She’d been seen in Moab with that snowboarder. Now and then I’d call and tell her how she betrayed me. I wallowed in the fantasy of my unrequited longing.

The story I told myself eventually unraveled. I replayed the memories. That night she offered herself to me: I hadn’t declined out of some sense of chivalry. It was because, even as every molecule burned to make a child with her, I couldn’t envision us raising the thing. All I could see us doing was smoking in bed and engineering increasingly innovative paroxysms. Which was what I thought love was.

Q already saw me more clearly than I did. I had shown her my heart, and she’d seen the cautious vanity I couldn’t hide. In the future I wouldn’t be so embarrassed to be a delicate writer, and I would treasure the exchange of ideas about literature and writing with a woman. But not yet. I still couldn’t see past my own delusion.

When writer Christina Lalanne bought an old house in San Francisco, she was sure it had a story to tell. What she didn’t expect was that the story would come to her in actual words. As Lalanne details in “Castles in the Sky,” her story for The Atavist Magazine*, the words were written in a diary and in letters that fell from the ceiling of the house’s basement while she and her husband were renovating it. The documents had been hidden for more than a century, stashed away by the man who built the house in 1910. His name, Hans Jorgen Hansen, was inscribed in the diary, which was mostly composed in Danish, but he wasn’t the only person to write in it. So did a woman named Anna—a fact Lalanne found odd, given that Hans’s wife was named Christine:

What drama or scandal was locked in these pages? Handwriting is a funny thing, not least because few people read it much anymore. Anna’s was neat, polite, and comfortably contained by the page. Hans, whose writing made up 90 percent of our find, had a bolder stroke. His flourishes veered maddeningly into indecipherability. In places, the pressure he exerted on his pen had made the ink pool and the letters bleed.

I sent a few diary passages to various Danish friends of friends, but while the language was theirs, none wanted to spend the time required to decipher such baroque penmanship. Frustrated, I made out the letters as best I could and typed the words they seemed to form into Google Translate. At first what came back was gibberish. But the longer I spent with the words, the more of them I got right, and the more the translator divulged actual language. I was also becoming familiar with Hans’s scrawl. His “D” was the longest, most elegant version of that letter I’d ever seen. It marked the beginning of the diary entry in which he lovingly recalled meeting Anna when they were children.

I eventually typed every word from the diaries and letters—some 20,000 in all—into the translator, and a picture of Hans and Anna’s story began to come into focus. Mat and I also did some genealogical research, amassing supporting facts. I found documentation of Anna and her grandmother’s 1897 passage to New York via Ellis Island. I found the household in St. Joseph, Michigan, where Anna was employed. I found evidence of Hans’s departure from Denmark after his stint in Faaborg—a voyage to Sydney, Australia, and onward to Brisbane—as well as his death certificate and a record of his grave just outside San Francisco, which we visited. We reconstructed Hans’s family tree and found a great-grandson on Facebook. We learned that Hans had three children with the woman named Christine, and that their marriage ended in divorce.

I was sure I knew why: Hans and Anna could only love each other. What then had kept them apart?

“Castles in the Sky” is a love story intertwined with Lalanne’s meditation on her relationship with the past, including the loss of her parents when she was still in grammar school. Through dogged sleuthing and poignant reflection, she seeks to unravel the mystery of what happened to Hans and Anna:

I have a vivid memory, early one morning when my father was in the hospital, of my uncle making his way up the carpeted stairs to the bedrooms where my siblings and I slept. I was nine years old. I knew my uncle was bringing bad news. How is that possible, to just know? Maybe his steps were slower or heavier than normal. Or maybe you can feel someone you love slipping away from this world.

Every few years I have a different experience of knowing. I’ll be in a crowd or walking down the street, and I’ll catch a glimpse of my mother or father. Something about the way they move or hold themselves or brush their hair from their face makes me certain. I’m wrong, of course, but the joy is true. If only for a moment, something I want seems real.

A similar thing happened when I finally found Anna. My trip to Denmark had furnished me with the facts that follow a person during their life, no matter where they end up. I knew Anna’s date of birth and the village where she was born and her date of entry into the United States. I knew that her father was Danish, her mother Swedish. I found her application for a passport. I looked at her picture, her dark hair and mournful eyes. She signed her name in the same meticulous way she had in Hans’s diary.

These facts are what made me sure that the Anna I came across on Ancestry.com was unmistakably, irrefutably her. My heart leaped in my chest. Then it fell, because of where I found her and what it might mean.

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*The author of this post is the editor in chief of The Atavist, which is Longreads’ sister publication.

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Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them.

My favorite place to canoodle with my boo is at the mall. I love shopping. It brings me the kind of joy that I imagine having a child brings to a mother. Shopping is euphoric for me. It is my personal treat after long days. When shopping, I always feel like anything is possible, like the world is at my fingertips, waiting for me to step out in my new outfits and live my best life. Several times, I have bought a few items I’ve forgotten to wear and have found them months later with their tags still on.

In new clothes, I feel like I am debuting the best versions of myself to the world. I like to wear them where I know enough people will see me, because if enough people don’t see your cute outfit, did you even wear one at all? In these moments, I enjoy the audience I often receive just for existing. In new clothes, I don’t care who stares. Strangers are often looking for a show from me, so why not give them one? If I am going to stand out, at least I will look cute while I do it. New clothes are great for all those reasons — as well as for the option of pairing them with beloved older pieces already in my wardrobe, as an excuse to wear those pieces one more time. And, of course, the smell and feel of new clothes is a beautiful thing.

When I am at the mall, I often ask myself, “What can I buy that I certainly don’t need?” Ice cream, a cookie, a pretzel? All three. How many items of clothing can I buy without trying them on? I believe my record is four full outfits and a cute pair of shoes. You can never have enough of the thing that brings you comfort.

I love going to the mall with my friends Felicia Kazmierczak, Christine Goings (“Tinni”), Jenny Cerne, and Leigh Rechin. They are fast walkers and know by now that three stores in I’ll be wheezing like I ran a mile. They are great friends, always asking if I am all right and if I need to sit down. They even slow down for me, waiting patiently for me to catch up. Still, I refuse to sit, because I love a challenge. I seem to enjoy pushing my body to its limits, feeling unsatisfied until I am using a clothing rack for support while pretending to look at a shirt that is either hideous or too small for me. Sometimes I sneak to the back of the store, where the shoes are, just to catch my breath out of my friends’ line of sight. Despite their unending kindness, I still feel embarrassed when I do this.

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When I give in to my body’s protests, I find refuge on the benches outside my favorite stores — despite how immensely uncomfortable they are and seem to be proud about it. These benches are not technically chairs, so they don’t feel the love for me, they don’t care for my comfort, and I try not to take it personally. I also aim to spend not too much time on them, but desperate times call for desperate measures and my aching bones don’t care about my strained relationships. I liken these benches to the kids in high school who spend so much time trying to convince everyone that they don’t care about anything or anyone — yet in their attempts, it is clear that the opposite is true.

*

If you don’t need to rest with the help of chairs the way I do, you’re lucky, not in the sense that those who do are unlucky, but because the ability to navigate the world without giving a second thought to accommodations must be very nice. In the event that you do, welcome to the club, friend. I know how exhausting life can be, but maybe someday we will sit next to each other in the comfortable and soft chairs we deserve.

During our freshman year of college, my friends and I spent ample amounts of time at house parties chair-dancing in old recliners and stained couches, swaying to songs that were much too fast, and giggling uncontrollably the way you do when you’re tipsy and have the energy to stay out all night. When we stayed in, we did so to play card games like Threethirteen and Poophead. We played on the floors of our dorm rooms and in the empty common room, sitting in the tall wooden chairs for hours listening to Pandora until we were too tired to keep our eyes open. I miss those tables and chairs as much as I miss my friends. They were not particularly comfortable or exciting, but they were a part of my college experience, the nights when I knew that I had been chosen by the right people, people who were okay with Dragon Berry rum and ginger ale in plastic cups and laughing until I cried and almost fell out of those chairs. People who sat with me while I rested my bones and allowed me to pretend that I was not beat and a little bruised. People who sit with me still.

The chair I am most committed to is actually a deep brown couch in my living room, where I do almost everything, from TV watching to writing about TV and talking to the people who star in the shows. I often choose to sit on the far left of the couch because it has been kind to me as the comfiest part of the chair. In reality, I am sure that it is just the section that has gotten used to the shape of my butt — by force, not enjoyment — but she never complains, either way.

Now, this couch, let’s call her Vivian. (Trust me, she looks like a Vivian.) Vivian isn’t into PDA. She keeps to herself, very quiet and demure but confident. She gets me in a way that the bench from the mall does not. She cares about my comfort and well-being, and she doesn’t push me to spend money I don’t have. I love her in the way you do a well-worn partner with whom you have weathered many a storm. Though she isn’t as old as she seems. She expects more of me the way the people closest to you do, because they know your potential.

Vivian is stern but caring. She knows her worth and purpose and understands when to make herself uncomfortable in order to make me move. She has my best interests at heart and provides the kind of comfortable and easy relief that you might take for granted, convinced that it will always be there no matter what. We can sit in silence without the urgency to fill the space with words, the way one can when one is not trying to impress the other thing or person in the room. Together we have seen many rejections and acceptances, as many good times and badly aching bones as you’d imagine, as well as the in-between, the not-good-but-not-bad days. The days when I can’t be productive enough to write at my computer but can brainstorm in the Notes app on my phone. She doesn’t make me feel like I have to apologize even when I do. I will love Vivian long after she is gone or long after I am living with new couches and chairs to fall in love with. Vivian is the best of seats. Don’t tell the others.

Sometimes, when I can get away, I have a lover’s tryst with a seat we can call Paul. Paul is your everyday movie theater seat. He’s comfortable and likes to cuddle and be the big spoon. I imagine he’d wear flannel and chop wood if he could, maybe light the fire for our fireplace if we had one (and he were a human person) or make me coffee with one cream and four sugars, just the way I like it, while the night stretches on but we are not yet tired. He is adventurous but prefers the indoors. We have a lot in common. He loves films as much as I do and hates bugs. He understands that I can never recline my seat too far, otherwise I will fall asleep — and no one wants to fall asleep on a date. We speak quietly and quickly about one day watching a movie that I have written, because we believe in the possibility of that happening. While we are busy believing, the last preview ends and the opening to the film begins. We are never together long enough, only a couple of hours maximum, but when we are together it is magical.

The true magic of our relationship is the ability to enter new worlds together. Paul and I don’t get to see each other often, because movies are expensive and he can never get away from work, but when I sit in him, he takes away all my worries, eases my hip pain, and allows my imagination to run wild. He is so supportive of my dreams and reminds me to always work toward them even when they feel impossible, especially the big ones. We have watched so many great movies together and a few very bad ones, but we always have great stories to tell later, regardless. Paul is patient. He has to be, for the way he is treated by other moviegoers. I made him a promise early on that I would never treat him the same way some do when they leave messes in his home. This promise may be the very reason that whenever we see each other, I always have the best view of our date-night movie.

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Outside of malls, home couches, and movie theaters, I tell my own stories to crowds of strangers, some of whom have become my friends. I have sat on studio set couches for morning shows like AM Buffalo, chairs atop stages like the ones in Portland at the Affect Conf and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, for the Radical Women’s Night Out panel. I have sat in a comfortable but oddly shaped chair during a disability and ethics symposium keynote speech at DePauw University. My words have allowed me the opportunity to travel to places I have never been to, and to get to those places, I have to sit in a certain seat — let’s call him Brandon. Brandon is your standard small and uncomfortable airline seat. He’s got a bit of an attitude problem, but it is an understandable one. He is already bored of you before you meet and would happily relay your most embarrassing secrets that you told him in confidence if he could. The seats in coach are named Brandon, not those in first class. I have never been in the first-class seats, but I’ve named them Oscar after Oscar Isaac because he is dreamy and they are the dream. Anyway, Brandon is small and uncomfortable and bearable only once you think of being elsewhere the entire time you are together. (Elsewhere like your planned destination.) Brandon doesn’t believe in personal space; he can’t, since I sit atop him, and someone else, often a stranger, sits right next to me on his brother. Still, Brandon has taken me to new places, so I cannot be too hard on him.

The most difficult boyfriend seats, though, are those in waiting rooms. They aren’t comfortable and they aren’t supposed to be, no matter how long you are made to wait. As a trusted source who has spent most of her life in and out of doctors’ offices — from the waiting rooms for specialists to hospitals before surgeries and follow-ups for post-ops — I can tell you that these chairs are necessary yet terrible, and not simply due to their exposed stuffing or dull colors. There is the anxiety, too. Hospitals in particular make me anxious; they always have. Every surgery I have ever had was necessary, every operating room table I sat on before lying down was sturdy enough to do what it was supposed to do. I have been very lucky in that I have experienced no complications or problems during surgery, but my anxiety does not care for facts or reason. Sitting in those waiting rooms for follow-ups through weeks and months always left me petrified that something had gone wrong and I would have to go back under the knife.

The loss of control is where the true manifestation of my anxiety begins: the fact that you’re put under and you have no idea what is being done to your body, but you lead with the hope that it is the right thing, as strangers cut into your body in an effort to make it better. The reality is that I frequently cut myself open in the figurative sense when I share bits of myself with readers and audiences, but the idea of being cut open in real life will never not worry me despite the many experiences I have had. My fear is doubled when a loved one is in the position of appointments or surgeries, as my loved one and I wait for test results or to get blood work done. The act of waiting to know whether everything is going to be okay or not is the hardest part, and no chair could make it easier. Yet at the same time, despite my fear of these chairs, they do provide a semblance of rest for my body, and that is what is most important.

*

I guess this is the point where I tell you why I love or fear so many chairs and need to sit in them. I’m not lazy or tired, though sometimes my exhaustion makes the need to sit in those chairs necessary. I don’t give chairs names and personality traits out of obligation. I do it because I find humor and fun in it. In reality, who doesn’t need the mall benches or the comfort of a friend’s car from time to time? We all sit in movie theater seats and dream of life-affirming travel. But the reason I have to often sit and rest is because of my cerebral palsy.

My cerebral palsy is the annoying but endearing best friend in your favorite romantic comedy: the friend who doesn’t end up with the love interest but who seems happy with her life as it is (so you don’t necessarily feel like justice wasn’t done by the time the credits roll). The friend who causes you quite a bit of strife, but you can complain because she’s your friend. (If others tried to, you’d shut them down, even if they were a little right, because at the end of the day it’s all about loyalty, and you should at least be loyal to yourself and your people.) Cerebral palsy doesn’t always return the favor, though. Our love is a little one-sided. A thing she likes to do is make my body ache at the most inconvenient times, like when I’m shopping or on vacation or at the movies. We both end up losing. Sometimes, if I’m unlucky, she will tap the pain into the fight while I’m already sitting down and not doing anything extraneous. I think she does it so that she can keep me on my toes, but I think it’s a bit much. Secretly, I think she likes being the center of attention; after all, in all these places, she makes people stare. Often people stare at us so hard they run into things and could catch flies with how wide their mouths hang open. That part is funny once you get past the initial agitation. They behave as though they’ve never seen someone limp before, as though there is magic in my scarred and bent fingertips.

When I sat in a rolling desk chair at a summer park office job just before I started college, I felt like a real adult, one who would tell the visiting children that those fingers were magic, could grant three wishes if they believed hard enough. I told them this because I was ashamed at the truth, which was that I thought there was nothing beautiful about them. But I found solace when I was able to sit back down in my rolling desk chair once more. Rolling desks chairs are fun for the obvious reasons — I have never met a person who didn’t love to spin in them — but those chairs also never cared how I looked, didn’t watch my confusion about how to navigate a room. They never asked questions, just kept me up and able to do my work, to answer phones in an effort to prove my competence and pretend I wasn’t bothered by the questions the children asked me. Despite my love for her, I was so embarrassed of my rolling desk chair back then, like the teenager of a parent who tries too hard to be cool when dropping his kid off at school.

*

The key to living fully and as well as possible is comfort, and I’m grateful for the chairs and seats that provide me not only with comfort and joy but also relief from what would otherwise be unbearable pain. That’s the truth of disability I was once so scared to admit was an aspect of my experience: the pain. Living in a culture that is eager to view pain under the arc of motivation or as a tool to lean in to because it will ultimately lead us to surpass whatever obstacle is in our way gives me pause in my explanation of my own pain. I try not to talk about the days when I can’t believe that my body wants what is best for me as I lie and then sit on my bed with packs of ice and a heating pad — but I should, because they are a part of me as much as the cheesy tweets, the essays and articles, the good days.

Sometimes my beloved chairs are not enough to heal me and I have to pull out of things that I would have loved to participate in otherwise. Chairs are not as healing as they should be, and that is where modern medicine comes in. There was the time when I could not go to my friend’s birthday dinner two years in a row because on each night my hip was screaming in pain. There are the times when I’ve had to bow out of local festivals because of the strain walking long distances would put on my legs. There was the time when I missed a full day of activities at a conference because I was both sick and in pain, and the time I had to stay back during the night-out portion of my friends’ bachelorette party because I was in so much pain I was crying at the restaurant. I cursed chairs for not being enough to get me up and moving.

When chairs are enough, though — and they often are — joy is always right around the corner due to their replenishing powers. Joy is waiting to be noticed by my relieved eyes. Whether that joy comes in the form of watching two of my best friends get married, having lunch dates on Vivian with my aunt Regina, graduating from college, and going viral and being interviewed by major publications, it is joy that keeps me moving forward. My joy is possible in part only because in the midst of it the chairs are there, waiting patiently for me should I need them. The relief is contingent on both the joy and pain because it comes when my body hurts so intently that the most I can do is lie back and prop up my leg and remind myself that even on my worst days, my cerebral palsy has gotten me this far, so she must not be that bad. Relief comes when I narrowly escape the pain I was so sure was inevitable. I wouldn’t be the me I know (and finally like) without the CP, and maybe that means it is worth something, even with the way it can make my body ache and throb.

If there is anything CP has given me that is good, it is the opportunity to meet and fall in love with new chairs and new seats, to get to know them on first sit-dates as we discover what level of comfort will be offered to my body and how long the comfort will last. You should get to know who or what you are spending hours sitting atop out of courtesy. We get to know each other, the things we like, what we don’t, and because all great relationships have boundaries, we do, too. For the long-term chairs in my life, we establish ground rules very quickly. We have to, because when it feels right you just know and do not have the time to waste. For the temporary chairs it is like speed dating. Will we be fine together for a day? A night? A moment? We are not looking for commitment, just temporary comfort on my part, and to be used on theirs. There is still work I must do alone. I work not to use my chairs as crutches so that I remain inactive and antisocial when my anxiety manifests itself as phantom pain. The good news is that I can do my work while they do theirs. They work to provide me with moments of rejuvenation both big and small. Once we are past the first sit-date and the defining of the relationship, we enter the lovey-dovey phase. Here we are a well-oiled machine, a weather-worn and tested love of the ages.

In this phase of our relationship, I spend as much time as possible in my chosen chair despite every request I get to leave it and be social. We are inseparable, excited to watch TV, write, interview, and relax together. The love is new and therefore I see no fault in the chair that I have chosen, ignoring red flags like their color, thin cushioning, or rickety legs. We can’t both be barely holding it together, but sometimes that’s how it happens. In this phase, I am always trying to look my best whenever I occupy its space, trick it into believing this is what it will always get from me even though we both know the truth. I also find myself being uncharacteristically careful with what and how I eat while in the chair. I am careful not to spill on it and damage what we are building together. It is very easy to see why I am single in these moments, because I am genuinely concerned about how the chairs will perceive me. We will eventually fall out of the infatuation phase but remain close enough to reach an understanding that we want the same thing: to be meaningful to each other’s lives.

*

The truth is, chairs are a meaningful part of my life and the lives of disabled folks alike who need a moment, a place to just be as the world moves around us at whatever pace it chooses. Chairs are a functioning reprieve from the harsh realities of the world, and they often give us tickets to see it in all of its beauty and problems, because no one place is perfect — but it is nice to be in places that come close.

As I’ve already made clear, I love chairs, and I wrote this essay not just because I was trying to be funny (though I hope you laughed a bit) but also because all too often we equate sitting and resting, taking breaks and catching our breath, with inherent laziness. There is a belief that we must always keep moving and pushing ourselves well beyond our limits to please others or their ideas of who we are supposed to be. This is a philosophy that has proved to be harmful for many people. I sometimes buy into the idea against my better judgment, too. I push my body to its limits and beyond because I try to be the person who strangers expect, the disabled girl who is beating the odds, despite my knowing how ridiculous that notion is. I recognize the fact that I sometimes don’t practice what I preach, but that’s why, for me, chairs are not just punch lines to an essay or a joke but the objects that keep me able to rest up and in turn be active in my body. While I continue to acknowledge that rest can also keep me healthier and energized enough to be lively in the long run, this also means that I have to acknowledge that no disabled person should have to be active or constantly moving to push themselves past unhealthy limits to be valued. There is no right or wrong way or reason to rest in your chairs when your body is telling you to slow down.

Chairs are amazing and don’t get the credit that they deserve. Have you thanked a chair today? Maybe hug the next one you see and remember that they are there for a reason and they are helping people in small and big ways. They keep the people you love able to participate in your lives in a way that they might not be able to otherwise.

* * *

Excerpted from The Pretty One by Keah Brown. Copyright © 2019 by Keah Brown. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Keah Brown is a journalist, freelance writer, and activist. She has written about living with cerebral palsy in Teen Vogue, Essence, Catapult, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and other publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the State University of New York at Fredonia and she has a love for popular culture and cheesecake. She lives in New York with her family.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

“I have often had the experience of looking at love from a distance,” Thomas Dai writes in The Southern Review, “of knowing it more as a concept than as the warm, embodied feeling it is supposed to be.” By photographing the inscriptions that lovers leave on rocks, trees, and various public places around the world, Dai finds insight into what queer love is and might be for him. Although sexually active, he examines his desire for encounters versus the kind of romance that leaves its own lasting mark. In the process, he leaves his mark in this personal essay, rather than carved deep enough into bark to kill the tree.

Looking through the photos in my folio, I realize that the lovers’ marks repeatedly appear in places where two entities meet in discord or unity. Romantic vandals leave their marks at the Grand Canyon, where red earth cleaves into blue sky, and at Niagara Falls, where Canada abuts America. The lovers go to Stanley Market, in Hong Kong, to sprinkle their names on the tide line, and they haunt the grounds at Dunkirk and Manassas, where opposed forces once met in mutually assured destruction.

I don’t know yet whether our doubleness needs such commemoration, if I should be getting out my chisel and my paints and going to that border, that wall, that place where often we like to meet. For so long, I have thought about love as a feeling which leaves no such traces, which lives and dies in the moment. I have thought about love through the words of philosophers like Barthes and poets like Ocean Vuong—Vuong who writes: “To love / another man / is to leave no one behind.”

What I have avoided thinking about too deeply is the hope I hold against these words, the hope that we will not disappear into or away from each other, that we will keep our separateness but stay somehow a unit, moving through the world not alone but in each other’s company, each other’s co-feeling. For some reason, I do not balk at the cliché this figure enacts—love as two people’s shared journey, a long march through city and fen. I think of a time long ago, in Manchuria, when I watched many couples casting red paper lanterns over a frozen river. There was a metal train bridge in that city, covered in thousands of lovers’ marks left by people from all over China. I spent hours picking over this bridge as carefully as I could, wanting to record each and every lover’s mark I could find, to bear witness, however fleeting, to all these collected love affairs, these different moments excerpted from so many strange lives. Standing at the bridge’s center one night, I looked out and saw a flock of lanterns detach from the river’s southern bank. The lanterns floated on unsure winds to the river’s other side, where I assume they fell into the snowdrifts as trash.

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Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | March 2019 |7 minutes (1,794 words)

In a photo dated September 1983, my father stands alone, 30ish, and relaxed, with arms akimbo and a slight belly bulge on a porch outside Superior Baths in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In another image with the same timestamp, my mother reclines on a pink-framed bed and paints her nails. I’d call her posture dainty, how she holds her head at an angle, crosses one bare leg over the other. It is obviously shot by her lover. Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.

I also had incomplete, fragmented memories that felt sharp, scattered about my mind like bits of glass. They are records of fact, but also, possibly, my imagination: a blue light of something lost yet unnamed and refracted back to me. In one, I stand near the front door of our first home as my parents, far away, on the other side of the room, embrace with hips and arms touching. I peek at them above the piece of newspaper I have found to hide my face. The heat of their embrace embarrasses me; their smiles seem private and new. In the other, they slow dance on our fluffy green shag carpet, but I cannot recall what music they dance to.

When I think of my father back then, the Luther Vandross album, Never Too Much comes to mind. Luther wears a leather jacket on the cover, opened to reveal a crisp white shirt and a grin that reaches his watery eyes and creases his forehead. It was his solo debut, after years composing, producing, arranging, and singing backup for, among many, David Bowie, Chic, and Roberta Flack. Luther’s weight fluctuated during those years. He battled hypertension and diabetes and tried to manage it by managing his waistline. Through his first decade of  solo success, when records like, “Any Love,” and “So Amazing,” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” burned through car stereos on my street, his weight was the subject of loving jokes from his fans. Big Luther’s voice was better, sexier, more supple than little Luther’s, people would say.

My father’s weight went up and down during those years, too. When we were closest, he was merely portly, but he smoked and drank cans of Pepsi in rapid succession. This worried me, so with my mother’s help, I made a case for him to quit cigarettes. “Maybe you could eat more oranges instead,” I told him. Time passed and he became so obese it wore down his femurs, and he had difficulty walking a long block without losing his breath.

My Uncle Frank was a glamorous gay man who lived in California and worked as a hairdresser and stylist to many people in show business. Before he died in the mid-80’s, he told us Luther was gay, too. It was a rumor we held as truth and made space for without using language we would today, like “coming out” or “in the closet.” We assumed Luther knew longing. We knew his performances were made of great skill, but recognized in them something so tender and familiar, we speculated the personal stories that must have lived underneath.

* * *

When I fell in love in my 20s, “Never Too Much,” the single, made me dance an ecstatic two step whenever a DJ played a set of R&B from my parents’ time. My college boyfriend J. was the pride of black upwardly mobile DC — the local paper profiled him when he won a hefty scholarship to university. J. was more like me than many of the friends I made — I, too, was paying for college with lots of prayers and an academic scholarship. We spent entirely too much time together; for a while, I liked living without boundaries. “Never Too Much,” an uptempo song of romantic abandon, was us. Marcus Miller’s bass is warm and ebullient, but mostly, it’s Luther’s phrasing that propels it. He sings every line into the next like it’s all one sentence, a single breathless enjambment. I remember joy in the moments we danced, but I now believe the source of my joy was the full experience of sensation dancing and falling in love gave me permission to have.

Luther’s cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “A House is Not a Home,” is the most enduring single from his debut. Kanye built a number one hit out of it in 2003, and it remains a staple on The Quiet Storm with Lenny Green, a syndicated show that runs out of New York’s WBLS on weekdays from 7pm to midnight. The most recent night I listened, they played New Birth’s “Wildflower,” released in 1973, then Guy’s “Goodbye, Love,” from 1988, which led into the Jackson 5’s 1970 Motown single, “I’ll Be There.” Then came Xscape’s recording of “Who Can I Run To,” an R&B #1 in 1995, and Ella Mai’s “Trip,” released just last August.

Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.

Green has been on WBLS since 1997, but Melvin Lindsey and Cathy Hughes at DC’s WHUR, the Howard University affiliated station, created the Quiet Storm format in 1976. Hughes was managing the station and needed a replacement DJ. Lindsey, then an intern and Howard student, filled in, bringing records his family owned. The segment proved immediately popular, and when he graduated, Lindsey came on full time. It was a striver’s music, created specifically to reach the growing Black middle class of DC and its suburbs. Hughes had taken the name for the format from Smokey Robinson’s 1975 album, A Quiet Storm, which opens with soft, howling wind, flutes, congas and a cooing vocal, suggesting, Pitchfork wrote, “a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers.” It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but didn’t go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees. My father climbed up the ranks with the state of Arkansas, while my mother worked at a city-funded hospital. Both knew what it felt like to dutifully train the new, younger white man who would eventually become the boss. They were people who deserved to relax after a long day.

Between my early childhood and my first adult romance, something about the soft, lovelorn cuts gave me comfort, too. At some point, I found a tape my sister made of Keith Sweat and Jacci McGhee’s “Make It Last Forever” — just that sole track, playing on repeat on both sides. Sweat’s lead vocal is sweet, vulnerable — it’s the first piece of music I remember giving me a physical reaction, a warm feeling, a fluttering. Now, probably because it was my older sister who brought it to me, who’d made the tape in the throes of her own early college romance, it sounds like what I imagine adolescence to sound like: rough at its edges, yielding and tentative deep inside.

* * *

Late in 1994, Madonna’s album Bedtime Stories came out. It had smooth, moody pop-R&B songs like “Take a Bow” and “Secret,” and songwriters Babyface, Dallas Austin, and R. Kelly were at the helm. The next year, the Whitney Houston-led film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale released, and Babyface wrote most of the soundtrack. It was a commercial success, and with slow grooves from Whitney, Toni Braxton, Faith, Chante Moore, and SWV, an homage to the slow jam. In some ways, so was the film. In its first few seconds, we hear the low, dulcet voice of an actor playing a Quiet Storm DJ. We hear him again at the film’s ending, framing events in the lead characters’ lives over the course of a single year. I was 14 when the film came out and didn’t share the heroines’ middle-aged love panic, but they were glamorous and aspirational, and the story’s main romance seemed to be the one between the characters, the friendships among the women. In turn, the strain of black pop on the album, one of many pivotal 90s film soundtracks that made an imprint and endure, created a mood, an ambiance that was soothing, a place from which to have conversations and communion with my own friends. In letters we circulated between classes, in bleary eyed late-night phone conversations about our fears, we lived with each other, we lived with the music.

The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star and written by a young Babyface came out in 1983. Midnight Star was a slick funk band heavy into synths, and “Slow Jam,” a cut from the album No Parking on the Dance Floor, was a duet. The male narrator “asks” a partner for “her hand” and for the party’s deejay to play another slow jam / this time make it sweet. Brenda Lipscomb, the woman narrator, consents. It’s a forthright demand for intimacy, for private time, in a public setting.

It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but did not go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees.

Obviously, “slow jams,” the sentiment and request inherent in them, both precede and extend beyond Midnight Star. My mother remembers swoony slow dances to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “blue light” basement parties in Chicago during her adolescence in the 50s and 60s. She said the psychedelic lighting in tight spaces made the parties feel sexy. Smokey Robinson was one in a constellation of artists who made sensualist soul music in the 70s. The best singers know all about tone modulation, but Minnie Riperton, Syreeta, and Deniece Williams mastered a style of vocalizing that often settled into a soft hum or murmur. You can hear them in the colors and emotional frequencies Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, and Solange tap into in their recordings.

These soft, tender soundscapes are, for me, tightly woven with images of black intimacy. Of two black people tuning into themselves and each other. When my mother paints the picture with her memories, when Kerry James Marshall paints a dance in a lived-in room — they are images that demand humanity in a way we may not realize is a demand. They insist on the body, on its flesh and blood. They gather and soothe the nervous system. They allow for a tender masculinity. They are obsessed with survival, generations, and continuity.

We slow dance, or attempt any kind of social dance, less these days. I think that’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance videos made us stir. The comfort and delight she took in her body were, for some, profane, the antitheses of how a leader should comport herself. And yet, I do not need to return to any era that came before this one. There is no idealized black past: women and queer people have suffered too much for too long at the hands of those we love. This isn’t even about romantic love; it is about the impulse. This is a reminder that our desires for sweetness and connection are and have always been a salve. The urge means we are not dead inside.

Alison Kinney | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,156 words)

1.

In the foreground of the early Netherlandish painting stands a couple, holding hands, amidst the comforts of their cherry-upholstered, brass chandelier-lit bedroom. The husband, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, raises one hand in greeting, but neither to his unnamed wife, who clasps one hand over her belly, nor to the lapdog at their feet: behind the couple, a small, wall-mounted convex mirror reflects two other men, facing the Arnolfinis in their room yet visible only in the glass. One of these men may be the artist himself, Jan van Eyck.

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture. Painted mirrors reflect their creators, or at least their easels, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson; in the Jabach family portrait, where Charles Le Brun paints his mirror image right into the group; and in Andrea Solario’s Head of St. John the Baptist, where the reflection of the artist’s own head gleams from the foot of the platter. Mirrors reveal the whole clientele and an acrobat’s feet in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; the two observers of a couple’s ring purchase in Petrus Christus’s Goldsmith in his Shop; and, regal in miniature, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Sometimes mirrors invite us to regard the artist’s reflection as our own; as John Ashbery wrote of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours.

The mirror’s revelations surprise everyone except the artist, who, in The Arnolfini Portrait, paints his signature over the mirror, like a graffito on the wall: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan was here.

2.

I put on a turtleneck to hide the bruises around my neck, then traveled downtown to teach my summer class. Some oblivious weeks before, I had assigned an essay about taking narrative control over abuse; for an hour the students and I discussed it. After class, I returned to the apartment I was borrowing. I laid my head on the desk. I tried to slow my rapid, shallow mouth-breathing.

Most days I spent alone, head down on other people’s desks, unable to shower, dress, or answer messages. Months of personal upheaval had unmoored me, leaving me marginally employed and roving between apartment- and dog-sitting gigs. Before my first teaching paycheck rolled in, I ran out of cash for groceries, but my stomach was too full of antibiotics, antivirals, anxiety, and air to feel empty.

My family and friends I held at arm’s length, because my defenses, like Magic Shell over ice cream, couldn’t have withstood their warmth. Or their questions.

A man asked me, “Why did you go to his apartment? Why did he do this to you?”

Maybe because I didn’t know he was violent. Maybe because I couldn’t resist telling him, “There are a couple ground rules you haven’t learned about consent.” He grabbed my jaw, wrenching it out of alignment. Then, as though I were corn on the cob and his hands were corn holders, he skewered his fingers into me, at mouth and crotch, and slammed me against the wall. It got worse. The analogy ends there, because you can’t make corn bleed.

Another man said, “This happened to you, because you went out looking for men.”

Shame, starve, sleep. Repeat. My hair fell out in clumps. I lived on cups of bouillon and tea, on silence and distance.

I was afraid of ever being touched by a man again.

I was more afraid of never being touched by a man again.

So I summoned all my energy to try life again. To choose rawness. Vulnerability. A different stranger.

3.

J.’s bathroom mirror reflected us: him in boxers, leaning against the sink. Me, draped over his back, arm slung around his waist. The only sound was that of our toothbrushes going for one, two, three minutes. We’d had only four hours of sleep, but we couldn’t stop smiling at one another in the mirror. After we both spit, J. said, “That could be an ad for Tinder.”

With no common background, borough, friends, or interests, only the miraculous algorithms could have brought us together. He was a full-time mental health professional, grad student, and therapist-in-training. He’d been searching for something casual, to slot between homework and patients. He got me, who’d been searching for possibility.

The ways J. surprised me into feeling:

By holding my hand all through La bohème, for which I’d tried to prep him with a clip from Moonstruck. He’d fixated on Nicholas Cage. “What is he — his voice — what the fuck is that accent he’s doing?” White Outer-borough Native — like yours, I thought. “Is that supposed to be a New York accent? Or is he British?”

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture.

By cooking and serving soft meals at his kitchen bar, for me, who had always cooked for men. Mushroom risotto, because my jaws still couldn’t handle chewing. Progressing to perfectly round fried eggs — he got a little upset when the edges bulged — and avocados on everything.

By writing to me every day from his fellowship abroad, sending me a travelogue, study journal, and litany of care. Because when I’d confided in him about the rape, he’d taken the news, he said, like a punch to the gut, then told himself: “It’s not about your feelings. It’s about hers.” Unlike most other people, J. didn’t tell me what to do or feel. He didn’t vent his feelings onto me or share fantasies about punishing or maiming the rapist. All that mattered, he said, was that I got care and support. He offered to be whatever I needed him to be: friend, lover, listening ear, or, if I preferred, a respecter of my solitude.

When I was frantically marshalling resources to workshop student stories about rape, J. took me to dinner and asked, “Will you be alright? What are you doing to protect yourself? How will you care for your own needs, on top of your students’? Is your own support system ready to help you?” Without his intervention, I couldn’t have led that workshop with any semblance of calm; I couldn’t have assessed my students’ safety or provided support afterwards. After class, I shut myself in a bathroom stall, leaned my head against the door, waited 15 minutes for the trembling to subside — and carried on.

Another time, he brewed tea and settled us on either end of his couch, tucking my feet into his lap to massage them. He asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” “It” was the text the rapist had just sent me.

J. listened, without saying a word, just nodding and holding fast, while I told him about the men who’d sexually harassed, groped, or shamed me over the past months. About how the Truvada’s side effects depleted and sickened me. How every twinge and ooze from the infection the rapist had caused made me feel foul, broken, and subjugated. It was proof that my body was not under my control. Neither was sex, which terrified me, even while I craved intimacy. And finally, this invasion, this text.

Pressure built inside my head. I clapped my hands over eyes and mouth to contain the pressure, rigid with the effort of not sobbing, not making a sound, not letting myself go any further.

J. kept still, holding on to me.

The pressure subsided. I had not blown into pieces. It was safe, then, to go limp, damp-eyed and gasping.

He relaxed his hold on my feet. Then lifted them, first one, then the other, to bestow two kisses on the soles, with a tenderness that asked for exactly nothing in return.

4.

The first time I stripped off his shirt, I had to smother an inappropriate laugh, because the “Toreador Song” from Carmen, the most cocksure, testosterone-pumped aria in all of opera, was blazing in my head. His grace moved me like the flourish of a cape, an attack of violins, a sword to the heart of me, bovine, adoring. If I didn’t laugh at myself, I might faint later, when he came, then seized my hand to feel the thudding in his chest.

In Carmen, a woman who loves freedom is murdered by a violent, possessive man. The toreador, Escamillo, is not that man. Escamillo’s greatest, sexiest characteristic is his respect for a woman’s saying “No.” Because he honors consent, he earns that most ineffable, irreparable thing, trust. That’s why Carmen falls for him.

J. didn’t regard me as damaged. He believed in my survival. But he said that my feelings about myself were private and wholly mine to feel. “However,” he added, “the sex we have — that is ours.” It wouldn’t exist without both our bodies and the emotions, sensations, and responses we shared. We could adapt it, take risks, or slow things down, together. It was ours, and it was only ours.

I have always been secretive and reticent about sex. Searching now for metaphors, I hide in handiwork terminology: knotting, twining, meshing, braiding, lacing together. (I stop short at calling anything we did a tapestry.) These words also suggest healing analogies: mending injuries, reknitting fractures, reassembling tissues. He refitted me, seam by seam; he gathered me. He ruffled me, sometimes. Because sex after rape was not, for me, always about gentleness, softness, slowness. Sometimes I wanted to be fucked so hard it hobbled my gait the next morning. But only, ever, by this man attuned to every frisson of eyelid, toe, and thigh muscle, who knew to ask, “Are we okay?” before we started, and again, and again — until I felt certain that putting myself in his hands would make me better than okay.

That the sex was ours thrilled, scared, and comforted me. It was about trust. A dance, negotiation, or struggle between autonomy, control, reciprocity, and concession. Like the sex, the trust was ours, and only ours.

One night near the end of November, months into the relationship and hours and orgasms after we’d retired to bed, we lay still clutched inside, outside, and around each other. I didn’t run off to pee and avert a UTI, because I never wanted to let him go. That night, I knew that I wanted him forever. He squared his forearms on the pillow, around my head, and kissed me. Not a goodnight peck, not a post-coital cuddle, but a kiss like foreplay, like my tongue was something delicious he’d never tasted before. We drew closer and closer into each other, kissing inexhaustibly, although it was the middle of the night and we were exhausted, as though we had all the time in the world to kiss with no beginning and no end.

I put on a turtleneck to hide the bruises around my neck, then traveled downtown to teach my summer class. Some oblivious weeks before, I had assigned an essay about taking narrative control over abuse.

5.

Time was what we didn’t have. He said that he could never have prepared for the amazement of knowing me. He also hadn’t prepared to balance our serious, committed, monogamous relationship with school, job, patients, and family. He had no time to rest and recalibrate alone. I coveted more time than he could spare me.

We argued, split up, reconciled, argued.

Lack of time fomented doubts. When he was fearful of my impatience, I apologized, tried to stop pressuring him, and offered to be more constant or more casual, although I didn’t want anybody else: I only wanted him to feel free and relaxed. When he felt threatened by my older, stronger emotional ties to other men, or by the prospect of my leaving him for new ones — more available, more cultured, more talented — I severed those relationships and never looked back. I loved him.

To buy him more time, make his life easier, and assuage his doubts about my commitment, I washed the dinner dishes, scrubbed the stove and fridge, and polished the countertops after he’d left for work or school. Cleaned the shower, did his laundry. Swept floors, then bagged the leaves on his stoop. I didn’t want him to regret the morning when, while I’d slept, he’d showered, dressed, and come back to kiss me goodbye, but instead climbed back into bed to fold me in his arms. For half an hour he’d watched me float in and out of sleep — “you were groggy, but beautiful beyond words” — then torn himself away to leave, late, for work.

For his birthday I planted a cactus garden in a bowl: This is me. I am dry, sharp, and fierce. My root system is shallow, and I am more fragile than I look, but you need tend me only twice a month.

6.

One morning when I was home alone, violent abdominal cramps knocked me off-balance and down onto one knee, then onto the floor, clasping my belly. Only after a gushing flow of pinkish, bloody gobs, and more, and more, did I connect my recent nausea, weight gain, acne, and insomnia to the absence of my last period.

The pain — shocking, exhausting — was like the drawing of entrails. But I could handle it. I was grateful for it. Everything had changed: my body, his, and the way they worked together. He was already a father; he was the one man I’d ever imagined trusting to father my own children. In this loss that I’d never anticipated, there was a glimpse of possibility: something else that, together, we could make, that would also be ours.

Or, for the time being, mine. I didn’t want to upset him or risk derailing his end-of-semester projects: his degree, career, and future needed my protection. Later, when we had time, we’d talk again about the children it might not be too late to have.

7.

We broke up on my 43rd birthday, after he’d canceled our dinner. He said he couldn’t make me or anybody else happy. He needed to be alone, without responsibility for other people’s emotions. Perhaps we could find a better way to be together, in January, after I’d returned, alone, from the desert vacation he was supposed to join me for.

He wrote, “I trust your resilience and know that your feelings of distress will pass before you know it.” I thanked him for everything he had done for me. I apologized for troubling him. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Thank you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop apologizing. He accepted all my apologies.

J.’s bathroom mirror reflected us: him in boxers, leaning against the sink. Me, draped over his back, arm slung around his waist. We’d had only four hours of sleep, but we couldn’t stop smiling at one another in the mirror.

And I grieved, curled into a ball, until muscle spasms prevented my turning over in bed, sitting up straight, walking upright, or laughing, not that I was tempted. I grieved and was grateful, because no man had ever cared for me the way J. had. Because I’d never fully acknowledged the toll that caring took on him, nor reciprocated his generosity. Because healing someone, loving someone, and wanting what she wanted were not the same things. Because I respected his desire — right — need to exit our relationship. Because I had to let him go, and, wishing that I had done so as a gift to him, out of love and gratitude, knew that it was only because I’d had no choice, because he had already let me go.

8.

Later that week, on Christmas Eve, a comment on his band’s Instagram account led to an unknown woman’s page, full of photographs of home-cooked meals, all of which J. had clicked Like on. They felt uncanny. Then I recognized the white dishes and silverware I had eaten from and washed. I recognized the speckled white countertop I had scrubbed, and pressed my cheek into that time we’d fucked in the kitchen and I’d never minded all the bruises afterwards.

On my birthday weekend, there was a photo of pancakes. On my birthday itself, soup topped with sliced flank steak, and a chocolate cookie heated till it was melty, the way J. liked it. Chickpeas, rice, vegetables, weeks and weeks of meals spanning the nights he’d canceled on me, the weekends he’d complained of being too busy to buy groceries. All recipes he’d had me vet — because I was the superior cook — and said he’d prepare for me once he had the time.

My skin prickled with little tugs, like stitches being ripped out. Like basting threads, placed to last only so long as the maker needed them fast, ready to tear out.

Two photos, of eggplant parmesan and eggplant again, bracketed the last, boundless, lovely night J. and I had spent together. But it was another photo — omelet with avocado and salmon, served to this complete stranger, during the fraught, hopeful, profoundly solitary days while I was recovering from bleeding out my secret onto the floor — that made me start weeping and throwing up.

J. answered my messages begging him to tell me the truth, so that I could have some peace of mind, so I could move on. He wrote that social media made you see things that weren’t really there. He had been Instagramming with nobody, spending time with nobody, certainly cooking for and eating cookies with nobody. He had been alone all those nights and weekends, and had no intention of seeing or dating anyone. Nothing I thought I had seen was true.

Aghast, ashamed, I apologized even more for distrusting him and acting deranged. I needed to believe in his goodness, which had restored my belief that I deserved more from men than violence and objectification. I couldn’t allow myself to believe that he had altered the terms of our relationship without my consent. That he’d denied me my right to say yes or no, to stop loving him, to stop having non-barrier-protected sex with him, to stop cleaning his house for another woman’s comfort.

So I convinced myself that everybody owns IKEA dishes. That Lowe’s selection is not so extensive that we don’t all have identical countertops. I reopened Instagram to refute my wild, unfair, accusatory imaginings.

I forced myself to look at a bowl of seafood soup. On the border of the photo, almost outside the frame, there lay an overturned soup spoon. On its back appeared two tiny reflections. They resolved into the face of the one man I loved and trusted, on a night he’d insisted he was alone and filing school papers, beside the photographer, the woman he’d been entertaining.

J. fuit hic.

9.

Every portrait of a relationship yields more truth than what appears at first glance; each spoon or mirror reflects secrets, distortions, and additional characters unsuspected by the viewer. There is nothing incidental about these coexisting temporal and spatial realities. They’re all part of the story: the Arnolfinis holding hands, the dog, the men reflected in the glass, who serve as witnesses, interlocutors to that little wave, or chroniclers. These others, inside or outside the frame, are always there, whether the viewer notices or not, subverting the ostensible subject’s pose of solitude, and legitimizing or delegitimizing the relationships. By this visual expansion, the artist unleashes multiple meanings, stories, and lives.

What the viewer sees, and how she understands it, are something else. In the Portrait of Hans Burgkmair and his Wife, Anna, Lukas Furtenagel painted the couple’s image in the mirror as two skulls. That was a fun one.

The spoon in her Instagram photo reflects affection, companionship, time, and everything I wasn’t supposed to know.

The spoon reflects lies, manipulation, contempt, indifference, and the exploitation of trust.

We broke up on my 43rd birthday, after he’d canceled our dinner. He said he couldn’t make me or anybody else happy. He needed to be alone, without responsibility for other people’s emotions.

The spoon has nothing and everything to do with me. But like the title figure’s plummet in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, my experience is of paramount importance to me, and wholly peripheral to the main actors in the frame. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters….”

Or maybe not so peripheral. On Christmas day J. responded for the last time, to insist that the woman wasn’t anybody. Just an old classmate, a “friend-friend” who dropped by. He had zero interest in pursuing her, or anybody at all.

The one thing I know about her for sure is that she is a woman, like me. And neither of us is a nobody. Neither of us is not “really there,” no matter how he denies or denigrates us. And neither of us is to blame for any of this.

All these things are true.

10.

A man tells me, “So what that he lied? It’s a matter of scale. He saved your life. You owe him a thank-you card.”

Women tell me not to waste the stationery.

11.

Although we don’t always get flatware, suits of armor, and the shiny bowls of gaslights to flash variant realities at us, we live with them, all the same. We love, knowing that people are full of glory and depravity. Their romantic and moral impulses frequently violate our ideals of fairness, goodness, responsibility, and forgivability, yet still, sometimes, they and we succeed. People are complicated. But for the survivor of abuse or assault who still seeks love, navigating this commonplace fact makes for brutal experience.

After discovering their food porn, I couldn’t eat for days. Weeks. I wanted to be shed of my rejected, raped, bloody, uselessly fertile body. Instead, I forced myself out on a date: a distraction, a consolation. The man kissed me badly. Aggressively. When I told him to slow down, he insisted that he wasn’t the kind of guy who rammed his tongue down women’s throats. I said, “Back off, back off, back —” and he grabbed my hair at my nape, hurting me, and rammed his tongue in until I retched. He called me repressed.

I cried all that night, because J. would never have done that to me. And I cried because J. had hurt me worse than this man or even the rapist had. Skewed jaws, choke bruises, and torn flesh healed faster than trust. “Smile, Alison,” he’d written the day after serving my birthday dinner to someone else, “it has been empirically proven to make us feel a little better.”

All people are complex, but there’s the complexity that rapes and batters. My rapist is handsome, erudite, and a gifted artist, and he might be a great guy, too, if you just cut off his penis and hands.

Later that week, on Christmas Eve, a comment on his band’s Instagram account led to an unknown woman’s page, full of photographs of home-cooked meals, all of which J. had clicked Like on.

Then there’s the complexity of the therapist-in-training who lies, persuading a woman that reality — his own face in the mirror — is only a figment of her imagination. The complexity that never acknowledges, much less apologizes for the evidence of the spoon, except, indirectly, through later Instagram photos: he’s switched to flatware of hammered, dark, non-reflective metal. There’s the complexity so invested in the belief that he’s A Good Man that he manipulates and deceives in order to preserve the illusion.

I don’t know, anymore, where to draw the lines between more-or-less good men, more-or-less bad men, more-or-less #NotAllMen. If complicated people deserve the benefit of the doubt, mercy, and forgiveness, who benefits the most? Rapists? Emotional abusers? Gaslighters? Liars? I don’t see my tolerance for moral complexity making the world of survivors any safer, fairer, or easier. J. was the same person before and after he cared for me, before and after he disposed of me. When I was in despair, he salvaged me, with profound compassion. He also felt entitled to exploit my trust in him. His lies violated my right to determine my own bodily and emotional limits, the right to say no to his menage. My gratitude hurts almost as much as the betrayal does. All these things are true.

I’m afraid of ever being touched by a man again.

I’m afraid of never being touched by a man again.

I’m afraid of ever, ever trusting a man again.

To reconcile those fears will be a struggle. Trust that isn’t absolute isn’t trust at all. Yet trust needs to embrace frailty and failure. It has to allow for uncertainty, conflicted motives, and needs that defy reconciliation. Trust is the hardest thing to cultivate, because its existence is bound up with the continual threat of its own violation.

J. told the truth about one thing: I am, increasingly, resilient. Resilient enough to bear all these truths at once, and, armed and flayed by that knowledge, to keep daring vulnerability, pain, pleasure, and intimacy. And, finally, to relinquish my interest in J.’s story — to tell my own story and sign my name to it, “Alison was here” — and, reassembled, to begin again.

Alison Kinney is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. She’s the author of Hood (Bloomsbury 2016) and a correspondent for the Paris Review Daily. She has published work online at The New Yorker, Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, and other publications.

Editor: Sari Botton