I looked for Max in his office today at the usual time and he wasn’t there. I saw him at Lacan and we sat apart and we didn’t speak. He sat with another young woman, blonde hair, blue dress. Is he testing me? Lacan spoke about Plato, The Symposium, a text I’d heard about but never been taught, it seemed to hold an almost mystical significance for him, and for the other students. He was talking about the way that love serves as a border between two people, it is something they share, but also a delusion, and then he lost me. It made me wonder about Max, and about Henry. With Max we are forging something new, a new country, outside the bonds of a state-sanctioned relationship, but also engaged in something very old, the adulterous liaison, both of us escaping the official containers of our marriages, which are sometimes too small for all that we are, and feel ourselves to be. As for Henry, our love is the place where all the things we know about each other live, our histories, our common past, our hopes for ourselves, our shared projects. The border between us is composed of the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing and hope to do. It is an illusion, not a delusion, and the container is as necessary as the overflow.