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Examining this moment from a distance, I eventually wrote:
A love affair is like a stick of butter. It is a tender thing that has always been. We have this stick of butter, and we think, "Butter;" much as we think, "Love." One stick of many, we know, but one is all we need. And so we live, eating butter, growing tender, growing fat; until one day we find a piece of waxed paper in the butter sauce, stranded atop the broccoli spears—and suddenly our whole meal becomes unpalatable. For we have been reminded that our butter, like our love, though singular, is also specific to our age—packaged, modern, mass-produced, conveniently marked for slicing—and really only exists in a condition of one-at-a-time; which is to say that what is tender is in our minds, and what is real is the perpetual removal and replacement of its wrappings. Then I returned to the conclusion of the moment when I pretended to have been confused with someone else, and sat chewing on my fried egg sandwich from behind dark glasses. "Well," she said finally, "you don't have to finish it if you don't want to." |