“It’s a scrim,” I said.

“What do you mean, a scrim?”

“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”

“A scrim.”

“Yes.”

She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you scrim, we all scrim for the scrim!”

“Ha ha. It’s not funny. The scrim is ruining my life.”

She walked in silence for a bit, and then said, “I think I have one too.”

We walked on, thinking scrim thoughts, with chapped lips. Tundra everywhere.