Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.

“It’s a bad sign,” she says.

He replies drily, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”

After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.

“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”

“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”

“Well, you could have told me that.”

“You could have asked.”

At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.

My beloved stationery store is in the heart of the city, in a beautiful old building built on the corner of two busy streets. I make a trip at the end of every year to buy my agenda, which happens to be my favorite purchase, and which has turned into a sort of rite, but apart from that I like to stop by nearly every week to pick up, who knows, a transparent folder, or sticky page markers, or a new eraser that has yet to wipe anything out. I poke through the colored notebooks and try out the inks of various pens on a piece of paper trampled by countless unknown signatures and urgent, agitated scribbles. I ask for spare paper for my printer at home and boxes to organize my life’s paper trail: letters, bills, jottings. Even when I don’t need anything in particular I stop in front of the window to admire the display, which always appears so festive, decked with backpacks, scissors, tacks, glue, Scotch tape, and piles of little notebooks, with and without lines on their pages. I’d like to fill them all up, even that unwelcoming accounts ledger. Even though I can’t draw, I’d like one of those sketchbooks, hand bound, with thick cream-colored paper.