If You Are Lonely and You Know It (Currency)

by Yiyun Li

they were two people living in the present tense; as long as they kept to their routines, they were exempt from contemplating the future.

Homeowner—what a strange word, as though people living in a rented place have a lesser right to speak of the sweetness of home.

speaking does not guarantee a reply; being listened to and responded to requires status.

Talking to himself was not a new habit, but in his younger years Gordon had been able to contain the little boy’s voice inside his growing body.

called his stepdaughter. “My sometime stepdaughter,” he thought of Debbie and spoke of her to himself in that term. He felt poetic when he said that—Shakespearean, really, though had others heard him, they would have thought that he was talking nonsense. No one called their divorced spouses “my sometime wife” or “my sometime husband.” No one called their contacts on Facebook—old schoolmates and former colleagues—“my sometime friends.” But that was one phrase Gordon often used when he thought of people in his life.

Gordon liked to feel puzzled by un-pressing matters. They were worthier of his imagination: pressing matters do not allow the luxury of hypothesizing without ever having to come to a conclusion.

who might not even hear about the news of his death. Debbie? She would know, and she would care. She would shed tears for him. Perhaps the runts of the litters could always recognize one another,

“Half the world believes the wrong things. The other half doesn’t believe the right things.”

don’t overestimate your ability to do damage,” Iris said. “‘That way madness lies.’”

You hold on to some things for sentimental reasons, and other things for practical reasons. The same with people—most of them.

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next—only on those nights did he feel that perhaps talking to himself and the trees and the flowers and animals was not enough.

The world is full of random dangers that threaten to turn lives into statistics. The rational make forecasts and predict with data sets. Parents do not give birth to and raise data sets.

“Parenthood is not some special currency,” Iris said. “Being a parent is not a status thing.”

“There is never as good a parent as the one who doesn’t give birth to a child,”

“You and I must agree to that.” Iris was not wrong. She was a better parent than Gordon’s mother. He, a better parent to Debbie than Rebecca.