Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them.

she had no other way to deal with how seeing all her old friends, how being home—that she still called this home!—would trigger something feline in her, something that made her want to nestle into her old friends. She was not devastated by the loss of her grandmother, but she was jostled by its rendering of how time passes. It felt good to be with people who’d borne witness to the time passing, too,

She remembered a term she learned in a linguistics class for the way a word stops making sense if you stare at it for too long: semantic evacuation. That was what it felt like for Jenny. The world no longer had coherence. It was just a group of modules, diffuse components that dissolved into each other before you could even understand what you were looking at. The outdoors was a painted perspective of disparate objects. The houses were just bricks + doors + knobs + windows. The cars were just body + wheels + go. The people were cogs on an airport people mover. Look at the word boat sometime. You’ll never unsee the way it just falls apart in front of you. Everything was its parts; nothing was its sum. People who don’t know the term semantic evacuation sometimes call this feeling depression.

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

And Ruth took great pains to never give Arthur room to say the thing that seemed stuck in his throat.

He had now lived without her for nearly a year and it didn’t seem to feel any better these days than it did in the early ones. He tried to think of what she would tell him. She would say: This is happening to your body, it is not happening to you. Was death the same? Was this grief the same? Because it felt so physical to him. There was no way to ask her, which felt like suffocation. The only thing that had changed this year was that he went from being someone who was sad that his mother hadn’t lived long enough to see him get well to being someone who knew he never was going to.

“No, listen.” His voice was dreamy and his eyes were a melted pool of feeling. “I went away. I went to Paris, to visit Yvonne. Her husband just died. But I watched all the lovers in the street, and no matter how familiar she was to me, she still wasn’t you. I went to Israel, where I prayed at the Wall for God to alleviate this love from me. I went to Greece, to see how things that were older than me could survive. I went to India—I went to an ashram, and I learned how to sit with my thoughts, but then I realized that my thoughts were never the problem. You were.”