{"id":4384,"date":"2020-09-03T15:24:20","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T13:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prod-2018.frictions.co\/?p=4384"},"modified":"2021-06-18T12:39:01","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T10:39:01","slug":"ep-4-je-narrivais-a-projeter-dans-aucun-de-ces-hommes-une-ame-soeur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prod-2018.frictions.co\/english\/loneliness-is-other-people\/ep4-i-could-not-mold-any-of-these-men-into-the-shape-of-a-soulmate\/","title":{"rendered":"Ep. 4\/5 - \"I couldn\u2019t mold any of these men into the shape of a soulmate\""},"content":{"rendered":"
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The days continued to pass, and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. Friends would call, and we couldn\u2019t remember whether we had spoken two hours or two weeks ago. The virus colored everything, giving birth to alien emotions, blurring boundaries between the real and the imagined. I felt blind fury when our president suggested that the churches must be full by Easter, stabs of anxiety when the characters in the book I was reading walked into a crowded room. My teenage clients were sleeping till two and bursting into tears when I asked if they had finished fifteen pages of The Bluest Eye. One boy would only FaceTime as he wandered the streets of Manhattan like a hooded flaneur, and the sight of my city\u2019s painted eaves and bright blue sky, joggling with his every stride, filled me with homesickness. Another client, a freshman, had spent days building the most splendid of forts in her bedroom, hanging from the ceiling every towel and blanket she could find, sleeping, eating, and conducting all her classes there, until one morning it had outraged her with its messiness and she had torn it down. \u201cWhat am I doing with my life?\u201d she wailed. \u201cI can\u2019t just be building forts all day!\u201d My mother had started penning daily emails that doubled as absurdist literature\u2014had I heard that the dogs in Italy were getting quite exhausted, she asked, now that their owners were lending them to all their petless friends and they were being exercised for hours? Another time she sent a picture of a present she had made for her sister, a six-foot-long walking rope with handholds at either end. \u201cWhy,\u201d asked my friend Nellie, \u201cis everyone on the internet baking bread?\u201d<\/p>

On Day 20 I drove Oscar to an emergency vet that I had found in Massachusetts. Pet mothers were no longer allowed inside the clinic; instead you had to call from the parking lot and a technician wearing a face mask and plastic gloves would retrieve your animal from the passenger seat. While I waited, I read an essay by Ian on political fatigue and recovery\u2014finally, an artwork that I had actually solicited! Ian and I still hadn\u2019t FaceTimed, mainly because I was too lazy to wear real clothes or put on makeup, but we had spent three and a half hours on the phone the previous Friday, when I had found him charming and considerate. He had the deep, clear voice of a radio personality, and all the years he\u2019d spent at Trinity had given him the traces of an Irish accent. Since then, I realized, he had become the person I wanted to tell things to, the person I wanted to text when I was sad. Then Oscar was returned to me trembling, his belly shorn, and I spent the rest of the day trying to make a list of reasons why it would be all right if he had cancer.<\/p>

It was that same day, I think, that I finally broke my quarantine for William, a college basketball player turned environmental activist whom I had tried to break up with in the fall. His obsession with sexting and single-use plastics, coupled with his failure to ask me a single question about myself, had made me want to scream. I eventually told him as much and he responded by buying my book on Kindle, but things went downhill from there. \u201cI\u2019m just confused,\u201d he said of the preface, \u201cbecause it kind of reads like a memoir.\u201d
\u201cIt is a memoir,\u201d I said.
\u201cOh.\u201d He was silent for a moment. \u201cI guess I just thought from the title\u201d\u2014which includes the words \u201cWoolf\u201d and \u201cVirginia\u201d\u2014\u201cthat it would be all about Jane Eyre.\u201d<\/p>

Now he arrived at the door with a bottle of wine; he had been taking a life-must-go-on approach to the virus, but he still humored me by consenting to sit outside and apart in thirty-degree weather until the light had left the sky. Then we ordered pizza, opened more wine, and retired to opposite ends of the couch. I told him about my fears of single motherhood, and he suggested we become co-parents. I tried to explain why I couldn\u2019t raise a child with a man who was indifferent to literature, just as he couldn\u2019t raise a child with a woman\u2014me, as I had just demonstrated in the kitchen\u2014who didn\u2019t know that you couldn\u2019t recycle the greasy side of a pizza box. I was mean to him, I\u2019m ashamed to say, punishing him for the fact that I was all alone in a pandemic, that he hadn\u2019t been born a completely different person, that try as I might I couldn\u2019t mold any of these men into the shape of a soulmate. La solitude, I kept thinking, c\u2019est les autres. We argued for a while, and then we started fucking, leaving me with a tremendous sense of guilt at having endangered all humanity.<\/p>

That night I dreamed of two strangers, one of whom had peeled off the other\u2019s skin and worn it like a mask. When I woke, I realized I had been clenching my fist in my sleep\u2014embedded in my left palm was a row of little bloody half moons, and William was gone.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Don't miss the next episodes... !<\/p>

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