New Love

Watching two people falling in love at a party: it is as though someone has placed a glass lid over a cheese plate. You can see them within this transparent enclosure, but they exist in a separate world, they breathe separate air: each others'.

Years later you see them at another party and the glass lid has lifted, they now breathe everyone else's air. They have become common.

And as you watch them as they mingle with others, pour themselves drinks, laugh, sometimes even on other sides of the room from one another, you realize that the glass lid wasn't lifted, it was probably smashed. People can suffocate inside glass enclosures.

This made her think about common spaces, her own shared air. How once, for a moment, she had found herself within the glass bubble, unaware even, of its presence until someone pointed it out to her.

There is no appropriate end to this story because the ideal end would be neutral, and not sentimental, and not cynical and not laden with all sorts of editorializing and commentary. It happens time and time again, all over the place. It is happening in simultaneous places and to countless people right now.

And the people who were within that bubble are somehow changed, as though that experience has become part of their DNA. Like catching a virus that will forever show up positive on a blood screen.