Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway.

Not long after that, an ex-boyfriend appeared on my doorstep. He seemed to have come all the way from San Francisco just to have coffee. On the way to the diner, he apologized for never really loving me. He hoped to make amends. “Wait,” I said. “Are you doing the steps?”

Remember it is possible to feel this way.

This was a good sign, she thought, and was not canceled out by the fact that her son no longer believed in him.

“It’s an Ivy League school. But it doesn’t matter. It all comes to nothing in the end.”

What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

All my life now appears to be one happy moment. This is what the first man in space said.

Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?

“Were the parties always so dull?” I ask my husband as we stand at the bank machine, getting money for the babysitter. He puts the bills into his wallet. “That was a $200 party,” he tells me.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.