There’s a sentence of Alice Miller’s looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: “Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.” It’s the main thing I’ve learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time.

For years, whenever he turned away, I filled in the blanks with the script, but now he is here all the time, he won’t leave, and even so close by, his mind—the other’s mind—can turn strange and blank. You can fill in the blank with stories about coldness and stories of evil. You can try to chase it down, rope it, you can make war on it, but it will still be blank. You can rage against your dependency, the absolute need for the other that can never be satiated, but the other is, in their own way and not through their own fault, the very center of their universe, and there is a part of that centrality that will always be empty of you. You can study it and theorize it, but if the blank were not still bottomless, love would not ever go on long.

Maybe it’s not something to run from, but one of the best things, the way no matter how hard we try to study them, the selves of others escape capture. It is something to turn toward, the selfishness of others, a kind of gift: the thing that can empty the future of your fears from the past.

The selfishness of others is the feeling of your dependence revealed, as their gaze turns away. Your independence laid bare as myth. The feeling of being the animal you are, born of other animals, made of mirroring them.