We have ongoing arguments about the expression of sentiment. These arguments are ostensibly aesthetic, but really they are personal, the same old fights that couples who don’t write poetry or fiction have every single day, yelling across molded aspic salads: You say too much about your feelings. You don’t say enough. When you speak, it’s in the wrong language.

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation.

Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.