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 ends, a love affair begins. I worried the movie would make me too sad, as though recognizing where I once lived was too dangerous. Instead it made me feel the opposite of homesick. I was grateful for how far away I was from what I was seeing.

I was reminded of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the class dynamics in his chosen comedies of remarriage. He thought that wealth had to remain a given for at least one character: not because the working or middle class can’t spend time inside their sadness, but because their days don’t have the time to maintain the same dedicated interest in it. “This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth,” he wrote. “The people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily.” A movie or book about that sadness in between shifts would have so many smaller revelations, the single moments alone and unremarked on, but no less deeply felt. Like when I, on one workday, turned the corner in the hallway of my office kitchen and felt myself to be so completely grateful to be divorced. What would that have looked like? Like any other day, which it was.