Playworld

by Adam Ross

underside was exposed. After another

They liked the general idea but had no idea the enterprise required they bind their lives to someone else’s, to the limits they impose.

“We start to feel invisible to the person with whom we’re most intimate. We desperately want to be seen by them. But rather than address it with our partner and, God forbid, risk them ignoring us, we instead seek to become the apple of someone else’s eye, which causes us to drift further from our beloved until they finally notice our absence. Or don’t. Which confirms our invisibility either way.”

there wafted from the kitchen a smell not only of sausage cooking and the scent of tarragon but also apple and pumpkin pie. Mom and Grandma had dressed the turkey and were about to put it in the oven.

recognized the wait was over. This state of being I suffered wasn’t permanent, no matter what happened. It was mine to declare concluded, should I so choose, and that broke the spell. I got up, gingerly, and was able to stilt-walk, with almost no bend at the knees, for the remaining blocks. I was laugh-cursing the whole distance, and both feelings were real.

This state of being I suffered wasn’t permanent, no matter what happened. It was mine to declare concluded, should I so choose, and that broke the spell. I got up, gingerly, and was able to stilt-walk, with almost no bend at the knees, for the remaining blocks. I was laugh-cursing the whole distance, and both feelings were real.

confusing, as Elliott liked to say, her hope with her evidence, she’d meet his gaze full-on.

That she seemed entirely unaware of this power’s limitlessness made it all the more impressive.

“That’s because at your age,” Dr. West said, “you still believe you can love things out of people. Or love them into your life.”

Shouldn’t love be a swimming with, like fish in a school, as opposed to a swimming after? And if I wasn’t chasing, what was I doing?

“The aperture’s how wide the lens opens. The faster your subject, the wider you set the aperture. The wider your aperture, the lower your f-stop. Understand?”

Who would we see on our periphery, Shel wondered, if we adjusted our vision?

How rare it is, Shel found himself thinking, to simply like someone. To know, in their company, that you would never be bored. It

I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.

just because you have a talent doesn’t mean you have to use it.”

once again found myself being told something that was true but could not for the life of me remember.

I was riding two waves, abdicating agency because of circumstance, and I decided I needed to change this about myself as soon as possible.

So that when I came back to myself, seated here, on the floor, with Naomi, whose attention was complete, my loneliness was more acute than at any point in my life. When

“I don’t want to go upstairs,” she said. Then: “I don’t want you to ever leave.” Then: “I don’t want to lose my family.” Then: “I don’t want to be with Sam anymore.” Then: “I want to wake up in your bed one morning.” Then: “I don’t want my daughters to ever be this unhappy.” Then: “I don’t want to be scared anymore.” Then: “I don’t want to keep hating myself.” Then: “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you.”

“It comes from decidere. It means ‘to cut away from,’ like a boat from a mooring. A decision, then, is simply the beginning of a journey. If it seems fateful, it’s because it is. If fateful seems too heavy, subtract the weight from it by recognizing you will make countless such decisions in your lifetime.”

“She sounds like a girl who’s more afraid of losing you than having you. Does that make sense?”

“Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”