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One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage e…

Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-progra…

There was a bar we loved back then. It was red and unhappy, a dour subterranean neighborhood institution where nothing could stop us from being charmed by it. Not its stubborn insistence on overhead lighting, not the rotting pink bar of soap in the bathroom, not an overtly hostile approach to fulfi…

The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as r…

The other episode went further, yet was more ordinary. A teaching assistant had joined his class, she was pretty and flirted with him, and once, when the staff had drinks after school, they kissed lingeringly in the car park. Then he drew back from her, with some relief. After all he had Lydia now.…