There are always small material delights; toes on a shag rug, salted caramels in a crisp cellophane wrapper, someone telling me that surfing is like harmony with the natural elements and then closing my eyes and imagining what this must feel like when it is done well; anything done well. A perfect yolk, tapped with a fork at dinner, on a sidewalk with an old friend. Not the place, or the yolk, or even the word "yolk," although it is beautiful in its perfect, tiny audacity.

The comfort of familiarity. Like this: some people feel like home. They are not home. But they feel so much like it they may as well be.

Or the satisfaction of tiny accomplishments: I was a fat child who was good at Chinese jumprope. Two feet together one side, two feet together the other. Cross feet. Double rope. Skip in, skip out. I can still do it in my mind 22 years later.

Yolk mixed in pasta. Carbonara. You do it, you're better. A bird watches us from a fence. We look back at it, guiltily. A biker stops and smiles. Ludo Lefebvre is in the kitchen, his tattooed arms preparing foie gras cupcakes and lobster medallions with honey demiglasse and watermelon soup and onion confit.

But this is not the part that is familiar. Or home. In India, my family would take walks in the park in front of their home in the evenings, and this was the best part of the day. Evenings. The smell of hibiscus and guava sleeping. Sycamore trees that only want help shedding their bark during the day. Not at night. There are rules to these sorts of things. Run-ins with neighbors because everyone is out in their evening clothes, white kurtas. And there is a safety to this because we are all family and these evenings are the seed of all memory. Sometimes, the feeling of that time catches me, and this is how I know I am home. This is a time when it is all complete; the yolk has not yet been broken.

But enough of nostalgia, enough of sad stories about loss. Things visibly wince when this discussion comes up. A table lamp slouches on a desk. A pair of scissors falls into an open drawer. Not this again, they all say. But I am not at home, at my desk, I tell them. I am on a sidewalk, eating dinner. No, you're not, they tell me. You're remembering that evening so you can use it as a metaphor to tell the same story of nostalgia and lost whole(some)ness.

It's a good story, no? I ask.

It's an old story. And it ages us, yawns the post-it note on the table.

All right. How about this one:

My friend E met a girl. Let's call her India (her real name was Chyna). He met her because she was a writer for a music blog that he wrote for. She lived in Seattle. He lived with his parents. This was years ago. He was 22. He fell in love with her through her writing. He thought she was brilliant, they shared the same thoughts. So he decided to drive to Seattle to meet her. So he drove. They decided to meet at a record shop.

You're embellishing, says the penstand.

I'm a writer. That's what we do. And what's wrong with meeting at a record shop? People in my stories always meet at record shops. I have a musician fetish.

You're not really a writer. You just tell yourself you are when you're feeling down, says the manila envelope.

Get off my desk now. I'm serious. I'm not going down that road with you today. And the rest of you, do you want to hear this story or not?

Silence.

Okay. So he drove to Seattle. They decided to meet at a coffee shop (happy?) and he had waited for this for months. Chyna was his soulmate. She was the one. He sat down at a corner table and ordered a hazelnut latte and and waited and waited. And then the door opened. And an old man walked in. And then it opened again. And there was an elderly lady with a dog in her purse. One of those tiny yappers. The kind gay couples always take on planes. Then, a little boy in a raincoat and an umbrella. Am I losing you?

(Chyna is about to walk in. So prepare yourselves)

There she is! I can recognize her from her red hair! But she has her back to me so I can't see what she looks like. And now the woman with the dog is blocking her. But it's her, I just know it's her! There! She's turning. And she's...ummm. She's not cute. Like really not cute. But this is not a deterrent. Because we have so much in common. And she's coming over and we're talking and...she's sort of awkward and pale. And sort of hunched over. And there's sort of no chemistry. And something is discernibly off. And E knows that she's not the one.

Soulmates have defects, apparently. No one tells you that in books or movies.

But E decides to spend the weekend with her. And they become friends. And before he leaves, he introduces her to the friend who he is staying with, and now they're all part of a larger (real and not virtual) web of friends in Seattle. A good deed.

That's it?

No. There's more.

So E, who is definitely a little disappointed but trying to be mature, decides to leave and go back home. His trip wasn't entirely the torridly romantic experienc he had in mind, but not an entire failure either.

So before he leaves, his friend, who he stayed with for the handful of days he was up there in Seattle, hands him like a pound of marijuana in one of these ziploc bags.

Hold it.

What, stapler?

Do you even know what a pound of marijuana looks like? Or if they make ziploc bags in that size?

Maybe it was a quarter of a pound.

Do you know what a quarter...

Enough of this editing!

Why'd you say a pound?

I don't know. I'm trying to tell a fucking story and I don't always have all the facts.

So you just make things up?

Yeah.

Okay. Just checking. Go on.

So E, as a favor, drops the bag into his car's glove compartment and begins the drive home. During which a rock hits his windshield, forms a crack that slowly crawls over the entire surface of the glass. E starts speeding to get home before the entire thing breaks, and he hears the cop's siren.

I know what's going to happen.

I know. He gets pulled over, reaches into the glove compartment. The bag falls out. A $2000 fine. He had just saved up enough money to move out of his parents' house and into his own apartment. Also he has to go to AA metings for the next eight months. And he DOESN'T EVEN DRINK. Damn that Chyna!

You tell that story a lot, they wail.

I do not!

You do, says the penstand. And do you know why?

Why?

Because it is a story about you. You collect narratives about you. Like your father collected stamps as a child, of all the countries he would eventually travel to.

Very wise, penstand. but I will choose to ignore the subtext of what you're saying because I want to avoid that conversation right now. Are you saying that I will one day be fined for possession of drugs, or have to attend AA or that...

No. It's not literally a story about you. But it is a story of irony. You tell those well. Sad stories of things getting completely derailed. Even for a moment. And then you laugh at them. Because you love that particular sentiment. You fall into it like falling into a plush orange chair. Because you can't sit still in the sadness of real loss. You tell stories of small losses. Or even big ones, but you tell them like a joke. You can't bear to sit next to the hopelessness of real disappointment.

You're saying that for me, life is cheap fodder for a good story?

No. That's a byproduct. A funny story is the echo of real sadness. You tell stories because you don't approve of the way life is run. Even little disappointments throw you off for months. So you avoid them. And then you tell a funny story about them. And everyone knows that sadness is irony (like a depressed alcoholic woman) before it's all dressed up and made up to go out.

So then it comes back to the same old story, doesn't it, of me, an ocean away from where I was born, sitting on a sidewalk watching someone break yolk into carbonara, the night enveloping us like quiet parentheses, in the moments before time would eventually have to release us into life?

Aren't stories like dissecting perfect yolks, stabbing them with forks? A tiny gesture that can't be undone?

No. Stories are the impossible. Stories are putting the yolk back together again. Closing your eyes and putting it back together again, because it can't be done in real life. That's what you do. Quite painstakingly, actually. Even more painstakingly than you live life.

I tell my plants stories because maybe they are sad to be indoors. I tell my car stories because maybe it will make her feel better about being old.

You tell everyone and everything stories, because you believe that everyone and everything hangs precariously in the balance and that the only thing that can hold it all together with shoddy little stitches is a good story.

II.

Tell me how to be an ice queen, I ask Nav, tiny bites of tiny things, a glass of wine. My mother is an ice queen too. Not to me, she loves me, she's my mother, and she tells me things, but I've seen her with other people. And I can see that she is sort of intimidating to some people, and when I was 13 she told me this: "cultivate an air of mystery." It was anxiety inducing because it felt like a complete impossibility. I write. I can't cultivate an air of mystery. Those are mutually exclusive things.

Clutivate an air of mystery. Cultivate an air of mystery. The stress of it. Later, years later, I laughed at the idea. Because I laugh at any idea that surrounds a person as though it is bigger than the person himself. I laugh at a lot of things that require selfconsciousness, identities that take effort. She is mysterious, I am not. You are mysterious, I tell Nav. Many of my girlfriends are. They have that enigmatic cloud hovering over them. A diffuse light of ambivalence. I don't have that. How do I get that? Can you teach me?

It wouldn't work for you, she says.

Why not?

Because you're transparent. It's charming.

I don't want to me charming. I want to be mysterious.

One day you will be, says my mother. or you won't. It doesn't really matter anyway. It's too late for it to matter.

III.

Sophomore year in college, a boy who must have really wanted to get in my pants told me, after a film class that I looked like Anouk Aimee. I laughed in his face because (1) this is so far from the truth, and (2) he must have remembered me talking about how much I loved her after the second class. I was delighted that he remembered. That he tried. and (3) This is a moment where an enigmatic girl, a mysterious girl would have smiled mysteriously. But when that trigger goes off in me, I start laughing and I can't stop. So I started laughing and I couldn't stop. And it was terrible. We were standing outside the courtyard of the MCM building surrounded by Eurotrash wearing black, buckles on their shoes, all chain smoking cigarettes and I was laughing so hard my sides hurt. He never spoke to me again. It was over even before it began. So much of life is like this. It was never meant to be. Years later, I ran into him in a tea shop in West Hollywood. You still look like Anouk Aimee he said. He remembered. This time I didn't read anything into it. I didn't even think. I smiled and thanked him.

IV.

Jo tells this story about going to a stupid therapist, using the word "melancholy" and realizing that the therapist doesn't understand what the word "melancholy" means. I stole this story about a month ago and pretended it was mine. It was just easier to do that than to tell the story of a friend who had gone to a therapist, and you know, all that. Is that unethical? Like when R told me about a friend who is a photo editor and I was like, I know her, and R was like, "She's not really my friend. She's the girl who stole my boyfriend. But it's too complicated to tell it that way and it makes me sound vindictive." Sometimes stories are better told in the first person. So you have to steal them. Or edit them at least. Sentiment needs to be preserved and tweaked. Otherwise, what do we even have left?