Someday I will write another story about a village of people who live inside someone’s heart. It will be a children’s story but not really.

ii. Someone got to this blog this week by searching for “phrases in love letters”, which made me wonder if it is really and truly possible that someone might troll the internet looking for things to say to someone else about love. That seemed really sad at first, and then possibly sweet, and then I wanted to help them by writing some kind of “user’s guide to love letters” instead of the wildly unhelpful mess they certainly found when they arrived here. Would it be completely unromantic to start a service writing love letters on others’ behalf, or would it merely be a way to make life easier for people who are paralyzed by the thought?

[I will allow you to make the connection between this thought and "My So-Called Life."]

iii. Speaking of love letters, I’ve also been thinking a lot about food lately. In “the age of social media” (trademarked by someone, I am sure), it is easy to see when people’s loved ones are making them meals, and there is something about this that seems inherently sad. This can happen so rarely. It makes you wonder: “if you are not taking a picture of it, does that mean it only happens on the times that you do?” Are there really people who are really in love whose significant others aren’t making them pancakes every day? Are there people who have friends who don’t feed them snack-fueled dinners on the regular? We are all at a place in life where we understand that we need to think about where our food comes from and what is going into our bodies, but I fear we have not yet reached a place where making food, really making food, is the norm. At the very least, those don’t have the time and skills should at least be making sure that they arrive with their loved ones at a restaurant that does take the care to put well-executed food into their bodies.

I guess what I am saying here is that I suspect that the world of people subsisting on potato chips and frozen meals and take-out from nameless Chinese restaurants is greater than I ever imagined, and I fear there is a deep connection between those emotionally malnutritioned stomachs and our collective emotionally malnutritioned brains. I don’t know what to do about this except to say that you should think long and hard about the people you are very close to and what you are eating with them, and if the best thing you can say about them is that they made you pancakes this one time, months ago, you should set your relationship on fire and take yourself out to dinner immediately.

“It is good,” said Gwen when I mentioned this to her later, “to look back and at least be able to see how far you’ve come.” And I shook my head some, and laughed: “That’s the thing. I think ultimately, it’s reminded me that I really haven’t changed at all.”

This is of course not true, and never is, but it is interesting to read the words of someone you used to be and know exactly how many times you’re going to repeat yourself. I found two things, in particular, that stopped me in my tracks: not because I’d forgotten that they happened, but because time and self-kindness had softened them in my memory to be less bold and definitive than were in real life. The first was a response to a sorta-love letter, the first I’d ever written. “I know all you’re going to write back is, “?” I’d said. “You will then say, ‘It’s all relative.’”

He’d written back almost immediately. “No, I would’ve answered like this: “?!!”

“There are so many questions, far beyond just liking somebody. Can they honestly put up with my shit? Can I honestly put up with theirs? When i say “hey, I’m moving to Greece next month”, would they say “Yeah, i’m coming”? I’d like to think i’m extremely kind to friends; but significant others can get caught up in the same perfectionist criticisms that I level on myself.”

That note felt at the time like the beginning of adulthood as a space in which we could be calm and rational about feelings and events. It felt civilized, like maybe there’d be a future where you could just have some kind of panel discussion about love. Of course, it was in reality one of those well-timed anomalies that make it possible to stomach all the rest of the ways that other people really react to existence. At the time of writing, he was the same age that I am now.

There is this, too: an email I have read and re-read at least four times in the last twenty-four hours because it touches on every single bit of regret, vanity, and self-doubt I have ever had. In 2003, I was struggling to fund my first full year of graduate studies. I mentioned this fact anecdotally to my thesis advisor, who was the head of the undergraduate philosophy department at the time. She wrote me a week later:

Dear Sarah,
We’ve been working on trying to increase your tuition waiver at the GF for next year. (I didn’t mention this to you earlier because I wasn’t sure we would succeed.) Today I was told that your waiver had been increased to 50%. Would you let me know when, or if, you hear the same news? Hope all is well.
Best,
Alice

P.S. [Professor / Head of the graduate philosophy department] was instrumental in getting this to happen.
I mention this because there is another anomaly in life that is very important: when people you really, really respect come out of the woodwork to support what you are doing. Of course, there is a universe inside of me that aches when I read this, knowing that this is one of many tokens of faith that got put towards a career I completely walked away from without even so much as offering an explanation. (“Sarah,” said Alice a few years ago when I attended a reading for her new book, “where have you been?”) Regret is a shitty takeaway, though, and the reality is that if this has happened once in your life and you are not a complete savage, it will happen again.

I’m slowly learning to give the same kinds of advice that I have previously had such trouble paying attention to. I have been mulling this over as a few favorites and I have puzzled over the actions and the intentions of others. There is the sense that if you don’t succeed with respect to someone else, you are “wrong”. I don’t really have any brilliant answer on how not to think this way: it seems sometimes like pure over-motivational self-talk to say otherwise. I can say, though, that the “wrong” moments are all informative in their own way and should make us appreciate (rather than take for granted) those rare times when people are nothing but constructive and honest. Ten years ago, I’m afraid I didn’t know that either of these letters were instructional or unique or very helpful in navigating less-clear situations, and so they sat buried in an old inbox under a pile of other evidence that indicates I was “wrong” about so many things.

People have been real-talking the shit out of me lately in unexpected drips and drabs. I remarked recently that someone I know is wonderful but has a tendency to offer herself to the world very, very tentatively and then take it as rejection when she doesn’t get a response. “You do that too, you know,” said my friend. “You don’t put yourself out there as much as you think.” Last night I mentioned to Rebecca that I’d fallen into that ten-year-old inbox while writing. “My own inbox has been rather empty lately, you know,” she replied, as she is the person to whom I email all drafts of everything I write. It would be stupid of me not to recognize these moments as defining in the same way as Matt’s response to a love-ish letter, or as Alice and Jay’s efforts to secure me as part of a department. There are all of these things that we can say that we’re wrong about, but there are all of these other signs that are telling us that we’re headed in the right direction.

You have to show up, I guess, for those signs to make sense, and if you’re acting on them, there’s really not a whole lot of time left to worry about all of the times you may have been wrong.

(If this remains true, I should warn you now: There are some interesting things coming.)

That same friend, who happens to be the only person in the world I have ever been able to live alongside without losing my mind and who has figured out to a science the exact amount of aloneness I require from the universe, put into my hands last week a copy of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”, a book that I have read previously but have not thought about since I lost another of my favorite humans to Spain a couple of summers ago. I’d forgotten that it is not only a book about the writing practice, but about being alone and about love. More simply, it is a book about how the writing practice itself is about being alone and about being in love and how those two things are not mutually exclusive in the slightest. “If you read this, you will understand me more,” someone I love very kindly said about something I recently wrote. I feel this way about Rilke’s letters: like maybe, if it wasn’t one of the most pretentious things you could do to someone else, I could just get away with handing it to people at the start of relationships and clear up a whole lot of questions.

The best thing about Rilke, besides the fact that he’s writing letters to some random young punk poet kid for no apparent reason except that he’s just that gracious, is that while he finds both of these conditions necessary, he by no means implies that they are easy. He writes simply:

“Whenever you notice that [aloneness] looms large, then be glad about it. For what would aloneness be, you ask yourself, if it did not possess greatness? There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear.”

It is comforting and encouraging in this very nice, Rilke-like way, and it seems really important to remember that unlike people or money or anything else that you really want in life, books will always fall into your hands when you need them. Songs quite often work in the same manner, and if you do not understand the importance of art at any other level, it is crucial that you understand it at this one. There is just not that much else that you need.

Stephen Elliott over at The Rumpus is doing this relatively amazing thing called “Letters in the Mail”, which gives you a weekly letter from a writer of note for $5 a month. It’s amazing for a number of reasons – bringing back the art of letter writing in general, turning letter writing back into a notable prose form, adding value to “print media” and giving the post office something to do – but namely it’s one of the best and brightest ways that publishing is using the subscription model to offer readers something more, something exciting, something that feels personal even if it technically is not. In a really roundabout way, it is the beginning of the answer to the question, “What is the publishing industry doing about digital?”, and it is a much more thrilling answer than a base conversation about ebooks.

(It is about time that we figured out that ebooks are a format and not a revolution or a threat in themselves. This does not seem an arguable point – and yet.)

This morning I sat in bed replying to Stephen’s letter because it felt necessary to do so: even if it’s mass letter, even if you paid for it, I believe that if someone writes to you first, you are at risk for some heavy psychic weight if you don’t respond. As it happens, I will put off letter writing with the best of them, but when I sit down to do it, it is a format that I love. Earlier this week while searching through old emails for a file I failed to find, I found a love letter I wrote four or five years ago that I’d wager is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It, like most of my best letters, never got a reply. I thought about that quite a bit this week because it is so strange to be so bad at so many things but so good at writing letters, and so funny when it turns out that no one minds that long list of things you are bad at but that no one to whom you’ve written a letter understands that this was the absolute best and brightest thing your brain could ever give them.

I guess it is hard sometimes to realize just how lucky we are.

There are other kinds of letters, too. As the weather gets colder I have been listening to PJ Harvey’s “Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea” because it pulls my brain into New York in the spring when things start to bubble up and happen. I will say this: If you can listen to her song “Good Fortune” and not think of that as some kind of gift, some sort of magical letter in the mail written just for you, then I can only hope that someone has the good sense to drop a book into your hands when you really need it because there’s a strong chance that someone will need to teach you some things about aloneness and about love.

You keep yelling, “I need a map!!!” until you wake up one morning with a mild obsession with cartography.

Chapter Five becomes a map of your own, using small pieces of conversation and glass-clinks as reference points. How long does it take to get from A to B? Measure the space in between your first Sazerac at Monday night dinner as your dinner companion utters the words “wizard crush” and you start to giggle, and the time when you arrive home on Wednesday and your roommate emerges, glistening with sweat, from her bedroom blasting Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits and grins at you and says, “I’m just working through some shit.” That’s a couple of miles. Measure the space in between that time last summer you sat on a blanket in the park drinking Jameson from a plastic cup watching dogs and answering complicated questions about the future, and that moment last week when someone looked you in the eye and said “you are less funny than you think you are but you are smarter than you think you are.” That is about the same distance as New Zealand from New York. There are a couple of mountains in between.

Chapters one through four are about losing the map, or burning it, or waking up one morning and find that you scribbled in Sharpie over the directions with the phone number of a pretty-eyed boy. Chapter five is about looking for the damn thing everywhere and then realizing you’ve gone and drawn yourself a new one. Chapter five dances hard to pop hits, walks out of the room, looks back at you and says, “I’m just working through some shit.”

A couple of days ago I ate a bunch of donuts and forced myself to work through that project and start typing up notes on where it will go next. It turns out that, in a bare-bones “will need a number of revisions” sense, the damn thing is pretty good and the only thing that went all wrong was my brain.

ii. The ever-elegant New Yorker has a feature on the ever-elegant Carrie Brownstein this week. In it, Brownstein talks a bit about her relationship to relationships, particularly with regards to why her friendship with Fred Armisen works. Margaret Talbot does a beautiful job of giving that friendship a robust and healthy gloss, even as she notes that Brownstein is a woman “more defined by her work than her relationships.

“I never think of sexuality as an identifier,” Brownstein wrote in an e-mail. “What seems to have defined me more is that I’m pretty horrible at relationships and haven’t been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on—returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy—is what I know; feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.”

It is the first time that I’d seen anyone I really respect articulate a feeling that I have in a way that made that feeling not seem like a fault. It’s also the first time I’ve seen this kind of male-female platonic friendship profiled without being seen as suspect. Somehow it felt like progress, and it made me want to punch the air. It is strange how much better it feels to live in your skin after someone else has described that skin in words.

iii. At some point this afternoon, I remembered that Stars is a band that writes near-perfect songs, and I spent the better part of the day revisiting their back catalog and thinking about how an oft-overlooked but essential criterium for a good pop song is that it should make you want to fall in love with everything around you. Listening, for example, to the Stars song “My Favorite Book,” I fell in love with Brooklyn in the dark at 5PM on a Monday evening while running in 35-degree weather. It made me want to keep falling in love, and it made me remember that I’ve made more than one mix CD out of love containing that song.

It’s not enough, you see, to write songs about love. It’s not even enough to fall in love. You have to write songs that make people want to fall in love with the world, and you have to fall in love enough yourself to make everyone around you do the same. I don’t think it matters whether you write songs or stories or even if you’re an artist at all.

I think it is your job to make other people feel feelings. Your only choice there is to figure out what those feelings should be.

Obviously the real answer is that we should change. We will do so whether we like it or not, and if we put a bit of conscious effort into it, the odds of us changing for the better increase just enough to make a real difference. If we have goals that can help us work towards our dreams, then that means that we still have dreams. That seems rather important to me.

At the same time, perhaps I am merely overly optimistic about resolutions because I am actually rather decent at achieving them. I kept them simple for 2011: I wanted to make new things, and I wanted to make new friends. At the time I made them, they seemed impossibly hard. Now, I have at least three or four finished stories, a nonfiction essay, a bunch of half-finished pieces, and three chapters of the first draft of a book under my belt. I also have the kind of support system that I imagine one needs to have gotten any of that done.

I had a bunch of secret goals, too: we all do. Those are the goals you feel weirdly embarrassed about mentioning, even when they’re about simple things like health or love and they look like other people’s totally normal resolutions. (Maybe they seem embarrassing because they look like other people’s totally normal resolutions.) Looking back at those, only one didn’t get the effort it deserved, but I put more of myself into the rest of them than I even knew there was of me to give. That seems meaningful. That seems, if I’m being really honest, like I should have been presented with a puppy and a cake at the stroke of midnight to celebrate all of my accomplishments.

Here is what I got instead. On the very worst night of my year, I walked across the Manhattan Bridge and into the welcoming arms of two of my favorite people. They liquored me up, talked me down, and force-fed me one of the best grilled cheeses I ate last year. I walked home half-drunk and hopeful, suddenly feeling like big things were about to happen. That feeling, those friends, and that grilled cheese are as close to a puppy at the stroke of midnight as you can get, and that is what I’ll remember most about 2011.

(Also, the fact that it didn’t kill me.)

I stare in airports in a way that I never do in real life. I listen in on conversations with ease. Airports are purgatory and not a part of the cities in which they technically reside; when you are someplace that is effectively “between places”, you really get to act however you want. People tend to say what they really think in airports, and this is why you hear the most fights between couples and earnest calls home and an unhealthy stream of complains in every direction. To make up for all of the listening-in, I in turn tend to become charming. Every TSA agent in the United States seems to be enamored with my tattoos, and I use this to catapult myself through security and into the concourse and my newfound world of charm.

Today was an exceptional example of all of this, and as I moved through the security line I made eyes with an attractive lumberjack-type disguised in a blazer. He made eyes back, and though he stood at least ten people in front of me, he was somehow still at the end of the conveyer belt after I went through security. I had the sense he was waiting for me, because airports are also exactly like living in a movie. Still, he said nothing, and I put my boots on and swung my bags over my shoulder and headed to get my favorite Milwaukee coffee and had forgotten about him by the time I sat down at my gate with my honey latte, whereupon an attractive lumberjack-type in a peacoat looked up from his iPad and smiled shyly at me.

I told you I was charming in airports.

One thing that I love even more than I love airports is the way that take-offs and landings feel. Flights themselves are obviously cramped and claustrophobic and full of crying babies and germs; they are easy to be optimistic about but difficult to actually enjoy. Take-offs, however, the actual physical rush you get from leaving something in a pure, simple, “the buildings are getting smaller” form. In this easy sense, leaving always feels good.

Through a well-timed fare sale, I’d landed a first class seat on my flight home today, and as I settled in my cushy chair behind Lumberjack Type In A Peacoat, I thought very hard about money and how, if I had some, first class flights are top on the list of expensive things that may very well be worth it. As the very adorable steward asked if I would like a cocktail, the very attractive man next to me smiled. “I am so sorry, I forgot something in my luggage. Would you mind?”

I smiled back and got up, and we giggled nervously together as we held up the line and the woman behind me pretended to be gracious about it. Then I settled into “The Atlas of Remote Islands” and lost myself in other worlds.

In general, landings tend to provide the same rush as take-offs, with an added bonus of always feeling like a first day of a new year. Every time, I get the sense that when I walk through the gate towards home, I will be a better person because I been given some inexplicable new knowledge in transit. Today, just after the pilot announced our final descent into Laguardia, we hit New York’s weather system quite hard, and the ocean seemed to come awfully close awfully fast as the wind hit the aircraft. For a moment, it felt as though we were all going to twist completely sideways. My seatmate looked at me with his nervous smile as though I could tell him how to act; I heard other people gasp and suck in their breath behind me; the thought of dying in a plane crash occurred to me for the first time in my life. Less than thirty seconds later, we straightened out and hit the runway rolling.

My seatmate giggled and looked back at me again. ” The weather was much better in Milwaukee,” I said. “We should probably just turn around and go back.” Then I walked through the airport feeling quite lucky and still sort of charming, which lasted until I stumbled into the fifty-deep cab line in the middle of a New York winter downpour and life – and I – felt instantly normal once again.

People really seem to work hard at not being alone.

It was the books that got me. After a while I unwound myself from a conversation with a musician (they are always musicians) so that I could stare at the books in peace. Leather-bound burgundy covers on first editions of Dickens, Austen, Wolfe: it was the kind of bookshelf that I dreamed of as a child, before I grew up and understood the weight of books in rental apartments and the inevitability of never owning nice copies of anything. It was at least the sort of bookshelf I’d thought, after giving up my own dreams, that a guy I’d date might have. That was before I grew up even more and realized that one is quite lucky when one finds a guy who has a bookshelf at all.

Some people internet-date girls who share their name and think this is completely normal. Other people space out in the middle of party conversations because they’re dreaming about being alone with the books and think this is completely normal. We are all our own special brand of creepy.

Earlier this weekend, I was drinking at my favorite bar with my favorite bartender, who I sometimes think I must be in love with because he wordlessly makes me perfect Manhattans and looks good in a suit and wants to ride away with a hot chick on a motorcycle. I was waiting for a couple of my friends and considering the year and thinking about The National songs when he stopped to ask what I’d done that day. Caught off guard, I answered quite honestly. “I did my budgets for next year. I worked on a lot of spreadsheets.” The person who answered that question didn’t sound a whole lot like me, even though the words were true, and as he kindly responded in a manner that didn’t indicate I was the most boring person on earth, I wondered about that. How much of who we are is separate from what we do? What if I really am that person?

I guess the real question is, why would that be so bad? The answer to that question is probably the answer to who you are, and it doesn’t take visits from three late-night ghosts to figure that one out. It takes, at best, an evening spent shirking conversation in favor of staring at books on shelves, and the knowledge that you can count on your version of cool being someone else’s weird at any given moment.

The thing about the spreadsheets and the parties with the really nice books in really nice apartments is this: This is the first year of my life that Christmas hasn’t felt like a place where miracles happen, and this has me very, very worried that I have gone and become a grown-up.

This is really the only excuse I have for taking years to realizing the obvious: how many hours there are in a day. By many, of course, I mean few. Factor in a couple of hours spent getting ready for the office and commuting, estimate ten hours at work, assume seven hours of sleep every night, and consider the likelihood that there’s another hour and a half in there on the low end spent looking for food or exercise or whatever it is that you do more of. That’s 20.5, leaving you exactly 3.5 hours of your day to do Other Things.

It’s pretty easy to waste 3.5 hours every day, especially if your friends are as pretty as mine.

With this in mind, it’s kind of hard not to think of 2011 as a series of interesting successes and slaps in the face of time. I tried at some point to line-list the highlights and the lowlights, but the reality is that those matter only to me. I can tell you how much time and effort and heart I put into changing jobs multiple times, or into relationships or into training myself to have better habits, but I’m not sure those things matter all to much. What I can say is this: I have this pile of words. It’s not the biggest pile of words and it’s not the most cohesive pile of words, but I can tell you without a doubt that it is the best fucking pile of words that I have ever written.

I want to take all of the credit for those words and be incredibly proud of myself, but the fact of the matter is that every single one of those words required a heavy amount of hand-holding. The first email I got in the new year said this: “Write. You’re so good at it. You’ve done all the other things to get you to this place.” That email lives in my phone and I look at it at least once a week, because I am the kind of person who needs reminding.

It is also because I am the kind of person who needs reminding that I faithfully compile best-of song lists year after year; I send them to the friends who will appreciate them most, and I remember with uncharacteristic clarity the person I was at the time of each year’s compilation. Last year’s was a half-serious, half-lighthearted tribute to the life I led and a little bit of a fuck you to the place I was spending ten hours a day and somehow unable to escape. This year’s is still in progress, but already it’s a little tip of the hat to the fact that there wasn’t a damn thing I wanted this year that I didn’t go after.

How do you thank the people who pushed you the most at the end of a year? I don’t really know. I think maybe in some world where you actually live life by slick New York gift guides, you buy them leather journals and bottles of bourbon and really nice sweaters from the J. Crew men’s shop. If I am ever in any kind of position to receive a large sum of money for my words, I promise to deliver those things, but as it stands I think there’s a leap of faith to be taken here, and that is this: If you treat people as though they are these awesome and amazing things in which you can put all of your trust and all of your best hugs, they are probably going act like awesome and amazing things that deserve all of your trust and all of your best hugs. And they will send you really nice emails when you need them, and they will sit with you over whiskeys or coffees and watch you worry a lot about your words and in the end they’ll make you feel better about it enough to go home and continue working.

If I have leaned on you this year, you know it well. There is probably a me-sized indent in your soul that is still smoothing itself out, and for that I both apologize and am grateful. I’m grateful, too, for the fact that even when feelings and events don’t line up, words tend to never stop coming. I wrote an incredibly short piece of fiction a month or two ago that wound up being my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I think it might also be the best, and it certainly contains the best parts of me and probably the best bits that I picked up from everyone and everything around me in 2011.

It seems to me that year-ends should come with a thank you list rather than a look back at personal regrets. Maybe I can say that this year because I don’t really have any of the latter. Maybe it’s enough for thank yous to be unspoken and to take place inside of whiskey glasses and snacks that I was going to eat with you anyway, or maybe the thanks have been cancelled out by other things you owe me psychic energy for. Maybe someday I’ll have a thing that is printed that has a list of names and dedications in it, and then you can be in that, and everything will make sense.

All I can say for sure is that I am grateful, and that I would not trade anything that happened this year, and that despite inherent fears I am incredibly, incredibly excited about what could happen in the one to come. Know this, though, no matter what: if I have curled up inside your heart at any point this year and taken a nap, I have you on a list. Someday you will open your door and the mailman will hand you a beautifully wrapped package. Inside wil be your leather-bound journal and your cashmere sweater and maybe, just maybe, some papery piece of my heart that you can curl up and take a nap in.

Everyone holds unfair expectations of other people. It is a simple way to keep ourselves in check and maintain some general “best practice” for life. It feels good to have at least one rule, even if its purpose is to be more or less be ignored. Somehow it makes you feel like you have standards.

For a couple of years, my one rule was that I didn’t trust anyone who didn’t dance. People who don’t dance are often self-aware to an unfortunate degree; they don’t relax much; they’re watching you a bit too closely. I feel sure of these things still though I am ready to be proven wrong. During this time, as part of a natural shift in friend circles, I started becoming closer friends with an acquaintance. We went to a party together and I noticed that he didn’t dance all night. I am pretty sure I was still dancing when I left that party hours after he did. One evening months after this, when we were much better friends and I had been drinking, I sent him an email that just said, “Do you dance?”

“I dance, but only in certain situations unfortunately,” he replied.

I wondered exactly what those situations were and what was unfortunate about them. How were they different than the circumstances under which ordinary people dance? I waited for two years before I realized that I would never find out.

I have a tattoo with thick, involved linework on my back; when the weather changes and my skin dries out just slightly, the lines puff up and turn into strange Braille representations of themselves. This is when I know I need to put a coat on. It has been unseasonably warm in New York for the last month. When it hit December 1st and I padded into the bathroom in the pre-sunrise morning, I felt those lines on my back. I sighed the sigh of the person who wishes for eternal summers and I put on a t-shirt and a sweater and a scarf before I put my coat on. The train was delayed because morning commutes in New York are the stuff tried patience is made of, and when I finally got off at Union Square I queued up the same song I always listen to on my walk to 29th street. My timing was off, and I looked up while smiling at a new email and made accidental eye contact with the headphones guy at 16th street. I smiled because I was already smiling, and he looked away because this is New York.

It still feels embarrassing to pass him each morning; at this point I see him more regularly than anyone who knows my secrets or my favorite things or who has seen me cry. We will never speak, but it gets easier in the winter to pass someone on the street without looking them in the eye. There are so many layers of hats and scarves and hooded jackets, and the more layers you wear, the more you can feel like you are safe and hiding. We will never exchange words, but some night at a holiday party, a woman will lean close to him and ask, “Do you dance?” and he will say, confusingly, “I do, but only in certain situations.”