Anyway. The more I tried to get the characters in the story to enact the behavior that would lead to their relationship’s demise, the more I found myself spiraling outward to describe their entire world. How else could I show how death had infiltrated their lives and ruined their capacity to connect with each other? How else could I dissect the woman’s overempathizing and intense projection of her own fears onto the man’s grief? How else could I find out how to distribute fault? To get there I surely needed to first describe a whole society where, for instance, there are no grief rituals to handle death; everyone is in their twenties and thirties and has no intergenerational ties; awareness of climate change forecloses the future imaginary; gentrification is destroying the capacity for creative freedom (which extends to the creativity required for love); everyone feels like they are subversive while role-playing the gender dynamics and social hierarchies they’ve inherited; charity is the only clear expression of empathy; and so on.

I got carried away by the world-building. I told myself that the relationship was still the nexus of the story, its reason for being, but each time I got close to the lovers I found myself zooming out and inventing some new corporate scheme or technological development or subplot. Eventually a friend suggested that, the validity of world-building aside, I was maybe trying to distract myself from the thing I still didn’t want to look at: that wound at the center of it all. I had started writing the story to make myself deal with the inexplicable sadness of death and heartbreak, and still hadn’t dealt with it. Worse, two years into writing a full-length novel, I hadn’t allowed myself any closure for those old feelings, because I was still picking at the wound.