I think about my bakery friend that afternoon, as I tidy up the house. How quickly he’s become a fixture in my life, a part of the day I look forward to, though I don’t even know his name, and now that we’ve established this familiarity it feels weird to acknowledge we don’t know something as fundamental as each other’s names. I don’t know if he has a family, children, what he does for a living, who he eats all that tahini with. He emerged from the city, is of the city. I don’t even know where he lives.

His friendship, and Clémentine’s, are experiments. I need to live more in the present, to take things as they come instead of asking what they are, what is their nature, what is their name.

I move very quickly at the beginnings of things. I can’t stand the beginnings of things. Their eyes looking at me, the thoughts behind these eyes that I don’t know yet, the uncrossable distance, how they move unfamiliarly through my personal space. Whenever I started sleeping with someone new, I coped with this by converting them very quickly from a stranger into a beloved. This is where things tended to get complicated. Because they’re strange and foreign. And in the mad rush to cover that up, I formed attachments to people who weren’t going to stick around. I have to learn to tolerate the time when they’re a stranger. When they leave the house and I don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing. It’s terrifying to accept the essential otherness of the people we care for.

But what is even more terrifying is admitting to yourself that in spite of the bridge you think you’ve crossed – in spite of the fact that time, and you, and their commitment to you, have converted them from a stranger into the person you know the best in the world – in spite of all that – they are still irrevocably Other.