[...] In the back seat I texted with Felix and tried to think of a strategy to ease myself into an initiation of our breakup, not to break up with him then over text message but to foreshadow that all was not well; I either didn’t want him to feel totally ambushed, or I wanted him to begin to dread the realization of a back-of-mind suspicion. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted, looking for double meanings, plausible deniabilities, but there was no natural way to do it. So I just said I missed him already!!! with the multiple exclamation marks I tended to use to convey a sheepish sincerity.

[...] I told the producer she should go to a socialist meeting, where there would be a lot of politically engaged men who loved drinking. She replied, Oh, but I’m such a Hillary girl, and I knew exactly what she meant: she believed socialists were sexist. I had only been to one socialist event in New York and didn’t even vote in the primary, so maybe it was guilt that inspired me to begin to attempt to explain what Hillary girls were missing wrt the intersection of class with race and gender and sexuality, wrt I mean I grew up in . . . The women were silent as I went through all this, my eyes rarely making contact with theirs and instead looking off at the condiment-and-napkin station, so after a few gestures toward my socioeconomic background without revelation I added “but she does have to deal with a lot of shit” to make sure they didn’t abandon me at the Travel Plaza. I was offered the last curly fry. All in all it took us eight and a half hours to get to the beltway, in the rain.

[...] I googled “boyfriend died” and turned up several personal essays in which the aching sadness produced by the accident or rare cancer was always unspeakable, taking years to get over. That I found these unrelatable seemed an indictment of both me and the essays. I will not deny that there was some guilty laughter. I’m not trying to be cavalier; I’m trying to say I may have been at times a little cavalier. I could find no example of the normal way to react to the death of a semi-serious boyfriend about whom you felt ambivalent at best even before you realized he was pretending to be a conspiracy theorist online. It’s not very rigorous to seek out and prize relatability, but it can calm you down, and like expensive beef jerky this was something I thought I’d earned.

In Oslo, all the airport employees were friendly; they had nothing to worry about. As every minute moved me closer to the purchase of egregiously priced bad food, I gazed out the windows onto a solemn ice-scape fringed with evergreens, dissociated from my past frustrations, and aided by the empty stomach achieved a pleasantly empty mind. I found the layover a helpful temporal/geographic/spiritual buffer zone, by which I mean all of these things—time, geography, spirit—stopped carrying meaning as I sat and sipped an IPA the price of two IPAs at elevenish in the morning that was in my mind fiveish in the morning. On the flight, the woman seated in front of me seized the opportunity when both flight attendants had to attend elsewhere to pilfer a bag of chips from the food cart. Life was so full of possibilities, modeled by the seemingly regular people all around us. Stealing chips never would have occurred to me.

I WAS STARTING TO GET ANNOYED. THESE PEOPLE JUST WANTED to talk about themselves. They weren’t giving me a chance to talk about my characters.

WHAT’S AMAZING ABOUT THIS STRUCTURE IS THAT YOU CAN JUST dump any material you have in here and leave it up to the reader to connect it to the rest of the work. I was going to cut that dog story, but why should I? It evokes a mood. It relates to my themes. When I saw it happen it was somehow incredible; I was watching earned self-consciousness mutate into unearned self-preservation in real time, something I usually only saw online, where it was easier for the unbelievable to remain that way.

AN IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER WHEN LYING, TO REMAIN cool and not nervous, is that other people care much more about themselves than they care about you. It never occurred to me that some of these men might be faking it with me.