There are moments when you realize, suddenly, that you aren't as close to someone as you'd imagined. There is a void -- like discovering the box of cookies in the pantry as entirely empty when they were just the thing you'd craved. It is a sinking feeling which makes it hard to open your mouth, to explain anything, to wrap your mind around a moment that has just passed.

Selfishness is not a feeling I handle well; it is paralyzing, isolating. To try to tell someone about it is to risk persuading them.

Sometimes I imagine what it'd be like to see the film version of a particular moment in my life -- a split screen with phones hung on ears that dig deep for sound, for some kind of answer in the silence on the other end of the line, and a final resignation with a dismount like Chaplin's The Circus or Fellini's La Strada -- the rich black and white of 8 1/2.