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I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.

I didn't think it had to be, I said.

You know, you're saying that, but you obviously weren't happy that I loved someone else. It's okay, it doesn't make a b…

The restaurants and bars all had miniature Christmas trees and fake sprigs of holly in the windows. A woman went past holding the hand of a tiny blond child who was complaining about the cold.

I waited for you to call me, I said.

Frances, you told me you didn't want to see me any more. I wasn…

I know. I could have told you and I didn't. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh …

Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said.

Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on "niceness" as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel "nicer" than Palestine…

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted th…