At the culmination of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the title character leaves a voicemail for her mother that doubles as an ode to Sacramento, her hometown, across the country from Lady Bird’s college in New York City. As I imagine the filmmakers intended, tears bit the back of my eyes as Lady Bird’s voice overlaid images of California on the screen. I wasn’t sure exactly where the tears were coming from—the scene with the most raw emotion, in which Lady Bird’s parents leave her at the airport, had already passed. But Lady Bird’s expression of love for Sacramento (and, by extension, her mother) felt poignant in a small and neat way, like a well-placed line at the end of a poem.

This kind of nostalgia is a recurring theme in our culture, with plenty of lyrics and platitudes to describe it: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Or the only bit of Hemingway I ever feel like quoting: “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” I like to picture Hemingway at the original Shakespeare & Company, enveloped by the romantic streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter, thinking only of blue, saltless Little Traverse Bay.

As a child I internalized this; I lived in fear of not knowing what I was missing until it was too late. I wrote somber essays in my journal about the symbolism of trick-or-treating for the last time and watching my childhood slip through my fingers; little did I know that the day would come, quite soon in fact, when I had no interest in trick or treating whatsoever. In one of my favorite Peanuts comic strips, Charlie Brown imagines “security” as the experience of sleeping in the backseat of a car while your parents drive. “You don’t have to worry about anything. Your mom and dad are in the front seat and they do all the worrying…they take care of everything…” he tells his friend Peppermint Patty. “But it doesn’t last. Suddenly, you’re grown up, and it can never be that way again!” I discovered this comic strip when I was still young enough that my dad would carry me inside to bed if I fell asleep in the backseat after a long drive. The irony—that even as a child, Charlie Brown is still worrying all the time—was lost on me.

I knew, from the age of six, that I wanted to write. But everyone said write what you know, and I didn’t think I knew anything—except that, as a kid, I was deep in the good and easy part of life, and, so I’d heard, it would only get harder and sadder.

So I wrote poems about it.

At fourteen I wrote myself instructions:

Stretch your childhood
Like a rubber band.
Lassoing each coming year,
And let your youth fly
    As far as it can.

On my sixteenth birthday I was feeling especially dark:

Suddenly cable-knit sweaters and well-known teacups
aren’t enough to warm you from the chill that comes from realizing
you are just a death-bound cog in a rusting machine

Later, at age sixteen:

Maybe I’m going somewhere but I feel like
a baby zipped inside teenage skin-
I’m really only looking for childhood
when the colors and sounds were
softer.  

At seventeen I couldn’t understand where the time had gone:

Seventeen is no age
of mine
it is the number of times
you blink before fully waking
the number of bricks
on the path to my front door
the number of questions
that come so easily in the dark
whispers like snowflakes from my sleeping mouth

And so when it came time to move away from my birthplace, Ann Arbor, I acted out my nostalgia almost in advance. I wanted to leave for college, but I tried to plan out ways I might end up in Ann Arbor again one day, to raise my own kids. It felt like the perfect place to grow up: small enough to feel embedded in a web of community; large enough to not feel stifled. United in the collective effervescence of football fandom, but equally preoccupied with poetry, theatre, and student journalism. My public magnet high school, where we called teachers by their first names and shepherded ourselves to class without bells, used the motto “small school, open minds.” A few blocks from my house, Nichols Arboretum unfolded between our neighborhood and UofM’s campus, offering miles of woods and meadows and woodchipped paths where I could run after school, occasionally passing picnicking students, families walking dogs, or schoolmates passing around joints. Even when I was unhappy, I knew I was lucky.

As a result, I approached my impending departure with a seriousness that bordered on melodrama. During senior year creative writing class, I read aloud my “Sestina for the Last Fall,” describing my last autumn at home. (Sample lines: “Can I count on the year to circle/back here? For the leaves to drift down somewhere far from our/city?”) After I’d finished, a girl raised her hand and said, “Uh, are you going somewhere where they don’t have fall?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “But I’m leaving Ann Arbor!”

As it has for many others, the Me Too moment has left me scanning my past, remembering the scattered pieces of assault and harassment. I started this mental work about two years ago; until then it had never occured to me that any of my experiences could qualify as sexual misconduct. But the events of the past year have necessarily sped up and intensified the work. The images and scenes play on repeat. The doubts seem to have new urgency: Are you sure it happened that way? Why care about this when others have experienced worse?

And Ann Arbor, as my mind again and again rolls over the contours of my adolescence, looks different, its environment newly tainted. While preparing for a concert with my middle school band—one of Ann Arbor’s award-winning music programs—a classmate humiliated me when he touched my butt in front of everyone without me noticing. In that same middle school, other girls and I delighted in branding each other “sluts.” One day, in an effort to fit with beauty standards I hadn’t yet grown into—tired of being teased about my looks by guy “friends” in my class—I wore a new padded bra and tight Hollister shirt to school. I later found out that the boys in my Latin class had spent the whole period laughing and passing notes about how I “stuffed my bra.” (Ten years later, the sting of humiliation is long gone, but I’ve never felt comfortable wearing a padded bra since.)

Or what about the bougie neighborhood pool club, where I splashed around in failed diving lessons and shared frozen Coke slushies with the best friend who took me under her wing in a new neighborhood? When a bunch of us snuck into that same pool during an end-of-high-school party and went swimming, a boy grabbed me, lifted me, and pressed his lips to mine before I even had a chance to think about whether I wanted it. Caught off guard and unsure what to do, I kissed him back in front of everyone, and was subject to the taunts and jeers of the other boys all night, earning the nickname “[X]’s girl.”

I took for granted that my Ann Arbor Jewish community was sacred, familiar, and safe. In fact, my friends on the youth group board encouraged me to join them at “board bonding”—code for hangouts where everyone got trashed— because I wouldn’t want to drink for the first time in an “unsafe” environment. Yet it was at a Jewish co-ed sleepover that the hot older exchange student grabbed me in the middle of the night and wouldn’t stop holding me even when I rolled away. It was at a “board bonding” trip when a friend climbed into my bed in the middle of the night in our cabin, armed with a ridiculous excuse about why he couldn’t sleep in one of the cabin’s ten empty beds, not leaving until I firmly said no several times. During a hookup, another boy from the community tugged and tugged at my zipper, begging to take my shorts off even as I said no, no, not right now, not this time. There are more stories. You get the idea.

It took me a long time to learn to drive. At the helm of a giant machine, I felt small and inept. One time, while driving with my dad on my permit, I was pulled over for going too slow. For the first few drives on my own, after finally getting my license, my heart clanged as I obsessed over every turn. Within a few months, though, I had discovered the beauty of driving through my hometown at night alone, my mix CDs and Ingrid Michaelson album rotating in the dark, few others on the road but me and my thoughts.

For me and many other women I know—especially those who of us work in media and rarely go a day without scrolling through Twitter—the reverberations of Me Too have been exhausting, painful, infuriating. Yet for me there is something good about it. Thinking over things feels like dabbing antiseptic on a wound, a path to some ultimate healing. For so long, the incidents of my childhood inspired overwhelming shame and self-blame. If someone asked me to prom, I owed them a hookup; wasn’t I a bitch for refusing? Why did I panic when a hot guy grabbed me in the middle of the night—shouldn’t I have been glad? Now, I know all the things I didn’t then. Again and again I tell my younger self: You don’t owe anyone anything! It wasn’t your fault! You deserved better. A decade’s worth of shame seems to float off of my shoulders. I am almost addicted to that feeling of relief: so I think about it, I think about it, I think about it.

In journalistic and academic writing, one of the biggest crimes is the overuse of the passive voice. You are not to say “I was taken advantage of” because this is an unforgivable omission: it allows the subject to hide. It is a cop-out that allows you to skate by on less research, without clarifying who exactly did what. I am not supposed to say “I was assaulted” if I am not prepared to say “He assaulted me.” But something in me still resists the latter phrasing. Some of the boys mentioned here I have long lost track of in the world; some are longtime friends with whom I still exchange pleasantries. None of them feel like central characters in the story; none of them feel easy to blame. After all, they were working with the same script I had, a script that framed sexual activity as a game, in which men would inevitably try to take things from me and I would have to decide whether to fend them off. If I thought that’s just the way it goes, is it a surprise that they did, too?

Concerns about these ambiguities have pervaded the public conversation throughout the Me Too era, coming to a head in the (often unbearable) debate over Babe.com’s story about Grace and Aziz Ansari, or in the viral storm following the publication of Kristen Roupenian’s fiction piece “Cat Person” published in the New Yorker in January. The story describes a very brief courtship between Margot, a college-age woman, and Robert, an older man, including a hookup that Margot goes along with but later regrets. “Cat Person” took off, I think, because it gave voice to an inner monologue that many of us have clearly felt but always assumed was private and inscrutable. In particular, I was struck by the section in which Margot, after having gone home with Robert, decides she might not want have sex with him after all:

The thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.

I know I was blown away by this paragraph, not because it’s the most beautiful example of English prose I have ever read, but because I have felt this way countless times and never expected to see a description of that feeling staring back at me in the pages of the New Yorker. That complex conversations about sex, agency, and gender—the kinds of conversations I had with female friends at late-night wine nights near the end of college—are emerging into the public sphere feels like progress.

But progress can come with missteps and costs. In a thoughtful piece in last month’s issue of The Point, Anastasia Berg levels a critique at the ease with which Roupenian, in interviews, named Robert the villain, and the ease with which the reading public, in turn, gobbled up that narrative. Berg argues that this interpretation conflicts with the actual story, in which moral distinctions are murky and Robert is sometimes sympathetic. Furthermore, Berg says, Roupenian’s characterization of Margot as innocent, ending up in this situation accidentally, is dangerous, Berg says. We are so enthralled by the story because we can build a narrative of ourselves as Margots, she says, a narrative too clean to represent the complex mechanisms of human interaction. Of Margot, Berg says, “But perhaps after all she is only what we wish we were or could be: beautiful, naïve, faultless. Complicit in the sacrifice of our own desire and pleasure, only insofar as we cared too much. Too good for our own good.”

Berg’s essay struck me because it gets at many of the disquieting questions swirling in my own head over the past few months. When I read Cat Person, my identification with Margot wasn’t also a condemnation of Robert. I didn’t blame Margot for feeling unable to voice her needs, or for not knowing how to write Robert the transparent rejection message he deserved. I don’t necessarily blame Robert, either, who did not implant Margot with the internalized patriarchy that kept her doing something she didn’t want to do. I blamed him for calling her a whore, which is stupid, mean, and misogynistic, though probably not something that forever consigns a person to the trash bin of humanity. But, I asked, why, why, is my heart so insistently sympathetic with Robert? And what does that say about my larger outlook on my own experiences: why am I so willing to absolve the boys who hurt me? (Even writing that phrase—”they hurt me”—feels melodramatic and off-base.) Am I empathizing too deeply? Wasn’t I doing the same thing at the time, scared of making boys feel bad by insisting they leave me alone, even as they gave much less consideration to what I wanted? Why, then, do I still care, do I insist on being nice?

It feels good, to righteously ask myself these questions. Because why should I have to be concerned with the Roberts of the world? Why not put myself first, for once; why not completely condemn the men responsible for violating my boundaries? But that would be seeing myself as Margot, and following Berg’s framework, participating in a self-delusion that makes me feel better but gets me no closer to seeing the world as it is. Here arises the fear that I have in even writing about this: that I’m making it into something it isn’t, that I’m unnecessarily absolving myself because it feels good. (Again! That addictive feeling of relief.) After all, I now spend my free time reading feminist essays and still find it hard to be assertive with men who approach me on the street, or the subway, or at a bar. And like Margot, I still start things with men that I don’t want to finish and I can’t seem to figure out how to get out of them. At a certain point, isn’t this just an example of my own failings? At this point, what else is there to blame?

These questions are exhausting to ask and harder to answer, and I am far from being in a position to offer any sort of grand conclusion. But, as is often the case, there is probably some middle ground. I have long dismissed the stresses of my childhood because all of my problems seemed minimal and bourgeois— my privilege overwhelming enough to smooth over any cracks—an evaluation that still mostly checks out. But the sunshine-and-rainbows vision of Ann Arbor that I knew can no longer hold, not now that I realize how much misogyny, and hurt, pervaded my coming of age there. At the same time, I can’t erase the tape and write in a new past (or even a new present) in which I was only the witless victim, waiting to be preyed upon by all-powerful boys. Because isn’t that just another form of nostalgia, another colored film sliding over my glasses? And what of the world will that fix? The truth is, of course, that in many ways I was lucky, and in many ways I was not, and there were times that I should have known better, and many times where it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t. My life, after all, is not folktale or fable: it’s just a life.

What I can say is that there is a huge difference between where I am now and where I was at 14, or 15, or 17, when I thought I owed things to men and that they owed me little. Of course, the instances of harassment didn’t stop after I left childhood behind. The big city brings new challenges: a man who wouldn’t stop talking to me on the train and decided to get off with me at my stop; a source who pestered me with romantic advances while I tried to interview him. Still, at least now I know that this isn’t fair. I know that it’s not “bitchy” to express what I want and say no to what I don’t want; I know that my pleasure is supposed to matter, too.

Some days the gap between what I know I’m allowed to demand and what I can bring myself to say feels like a mile-wide ravine, impossible to bridge. But I never want to go back to the girlhood years of stumbling around, seeing no alternative to the patriarchal codes and dances I’d been handed. Of course, it’s not enough, but simply knowing that I deserve better has made an unmistakable difference: ultimately, it’s what keeps me willing to pursue romantic relationships with more hope and less fear.

Learning to look at the world through a cynical lens might seem like a casualty of growing up: a loss of innocence, as they say. But for a girl in this world—even in a liberal enclave like Ann Arbor—innocence is a liability, and by consequence so is youth. I would have traded away my innocence much sooner to be spared the shame of blaming myself for what patriarchy wrought, and to be assured that there was another pathway into sexual relationships, one lit by mutual respect and mutual comfort. The younger poet in me was right, that the colors and sounds were once softer, but there are advantages to being worn. So many nights spent reading my dog-eared Peanuts treasury by lamplight, hoping my parents wouldn’t notice I was still awake. I really thought Charlie Brown and I understood each other. How was I to know how good the driver’s seat can feel?

I’ve spent my whole life dreading the next step, overwhelmed by how much there is to miss. It’s not wrong to know how much I have, to hold it tight in my hands while I can. Ann Arbor is still home to some of the people I love most in the world. I will never tire of running through Nichols Arboretum, greeting the Huron River at the bottom of the hill like an old friend. But how much less poetic—and how much healthier!—it has been to realize that preemptive nostalgia is sometimes just premature. I still write poems, but haven’t composed a lament on my birthday in years. Sometimes I even wonder if the best is ahead.

Boston College has two main libraries. With spires that hit the New England sunset, the first library looks like the campus church. The second library is made of smooth concrete. Though the second library is used more often, it is loved so much less, with its monochromatic ugliness and solid lines. Still, work gets done between those worn gray walls.

One Wednesday during the spring of my senior year, I took a shortcut under the library’s heavy concrete ceiling. It was raining. The weak light filtering between the practical columns hit the gray with a small beauty. I took a picture. Later, uploading it to Instagram, I captioned it with the obvious phrase “brutalist Wednesday.”

Boston College O’Neill Library taken by Carolyn Freeman

That semester, my life was both predictable and out of my own control, like a marble bouncing around inside a pinball machine. I didn’t know what track each day would take, but I was bounded within immovable margins, a proverbial marble with one way out—graduation—and an infinite number of ways to get there. I careened from breakfast to class to meetings. I applied to jobs I wanted and to jobs I knew I’d hate. I made spreadsheets.

Four weeks after that first picture, I noticed again how the line of the library looked against the clouds. I asked my friend to smile and I snapped another photo. Posting the weekly gray square on my feed gave me some semblance of control over the dizzying pinball machine, with its flashing lights and shallow fun.

Eventually, the person who runs the official Boston College Instagram account noticed the pictures and started reposting them. The phrase became a hashtag. Strangers followed me digitally. I was called out in the campus cafe for being the “brutalist Wednesday girl.”

But life goes on. The pinball machine shot me out. I graduated, armed with a Jesuit education, a job offer in sunny California, and a newfound love for clean lines and perpendicular architecture.

That summer, I spent two months in Washington, D.C. The graph paper ceiling of the Metro and sun-kissed concrete walls of America’s federal buildings dotted my feed. In August, I moved to San Francisco. The city is crowded with purple houses and palm trees, urban symbols with a hint of a tropical air. There aren’t any of the concrete buildings common to Boston and D.C., where the heavy lines of brutalist Wednesday run parallel to the harsh weather and straight-talking people. In California, the bright houses and short-sleeved runners create an unreal tableau.

Without the grounding grittiness of heavy-duty concrete buildings, San Francisco seems like fiction. It’s too pretty to be real, a perfect city in a snow globe where it never snows. Every weekend morning, joggers ran through the park across the street from my house. Golden retrievers looped to their waists yap happily alongside them. I could see the runners from my bed where I lay too late most mornings, waiting for the inevitable need for breakfast to overcome the suffocating desire to stay in bed. I could see the sunshine outside. I closed my curtains. In February, I accepted a job offer that would take me back to DC.

The Embarcadero, San Francisco taken by Carolyn Freeman

During my six months in San Francisco, I cheated on brutalist Wednesday every other week. My first post in California was a picture of the DC Metro ceiling taken by a friend still in the city. Later, I posted pictures of shiny office windows, leaning apartment buildings, gray walls with light curving on them like a hyperbolic, washed-out rainbow, and once, on a day when I left work four hours early to lie in bed and try to breathe through my one unclogged nostril, I posted the sun through my curtains. I posted old pictures, or pictures of technically modernist buildings, though I doubted anyone noticed, and often, I didn’t post at all. Instead, I posted photos of light-touched purple houses and palm trees pricking the sunset. My feed morphed from Boston and DC’s washed out grays and blues to San Francisco’s painted skies. If I missed a concrete-doused Wednesday, old friends texted, asking if California had really changed me that much.

I brought suitcases of black skirts, shiny flats, and wrinkled blouses across the country. I packed black ballpoint pens and notebooks. I knew I would have time to write that I had never had in college and I thought it could be a reprieve from the professional world that would theoretically consume most of my time. But I got to work and everyone was in ripped jeans and white t-shirts and our CEO swore. And when I went home and tried to write, words furled out of me slowly and dumbly, like molasses spilling.

At work I had the mild kind of fun that happens when you sit next to ten other 22 year olds and at home I had the mild kind of stimulation that comes from reading top-ten recent fiction. I convinced myself that feeling flat, like a lake or a smooth pebble, was kind of a lovely thing. That the harshness of the ocean of my life out east wasn’t what made me happy, after all. Two months after I moved, I gave in and bought white canvas sneakers. The ocean washed them dirty.

When I went home for Christmas, I took the Metro to Union Station, where I took dozens of the same photo of the marbled ceiling and white washed columns. I stockpiled. I ate lunch with friends I’d known for a decade and a half. I went back to California.

Time passed for me in San Francisco like bricks laid by some mysterious carpenter. Eventually the building would be built, my internship would end, and I would go home buoyed, I thought, by an experience I held within me. In the meantime, each unit of time was solidly dense, impossible to make pass more quickly. I built a life hour by hour. It was nondescript. It was a wall of my own creation, unmarred by brothers or best friends. On the East Coast, those markers of a life stood stolidly.

It turns out that the elements that make up a life are comically shallow—the barista at the coffee shop around the corner making your order as soon as you walk in the door; roasting a whole chicken; exchanging playlists and realizing you both put “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” on it; a library card. You can find these things anywhere.

Brutalism grew in America from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the backlash to the Modernist movement mandated simple buildings made from raw concrete. Brutalist buildings are made to exist, not to impress. It is a seemingly easy way to build a building. A child could build a brutalist building with a fistful of clay and a lack of imagination. Gray fades easily into both the sky and concrete sidewalks. In DC, all of the Metro stations were purposefully built from raw concrete to look cohesively brutalist. Trains rush past graph paper molded walls, leaving a whistle in their wake. Brutalist buildings are camouflaged in cities, where stone-faced people rush between office buildings and disappear into subway stations.

The national highway system was built from concrete. Cars across the country circle up into the sky on concrete paths. In San Francisco, the brightly colored houses and feathered trees give way to gray, elevated roads once the highway leaves the Outer Mission and hits Daly City. Brutalism circles the country. Its solidness was built to last. My cab ride to the airport took me under overpasses made from the same material as Boston College’s library.

In D.C., I moved to Petworth, where pastel rowhouses are pushed as closely together as baby teeth crowding a child’s mouth. My apartment in Haight-Ashbury, dusty blue and missing a living room, would fit in like an eyetooth. The irony isn’t lost on me.

I had a terrible cold for my last few days in San Francisco. From midweek until I flew out that Sunday, I could barely breathe from my nose and my left ear was completely clogged. I thought of the doomed character in Infinite Jest who suffocates with a bad cold after robbers tape over his mouth. I was not yet there, but when I woke up a 5 in the morning with a sense and a half robbed from me, I thought it might not be a terrible way to go out. On my last full day in the city, I went to an apothecary in the Mission and bought peppermint oil, which I imagined would clear my sinuses and my ear and—bonus!—allow me to maintain my irrational avoidance of drugstore cold remedies.

I left the apothecary, friend in tow, to meet someone at a shop a few blocks away. Inside the shop, I dabbed peppermint oil under my nostrils and inhaled deeply. I exhilarated in the burn, the sudden feeling of life that came with the intake of oxygen, the muscular way my lungs expanded. I put a drop of the oil on my friend’s finger. It spilled. A wave of peppermint rose up from the concrete floor to greet us, and we made a quick exit. Outside, he inhaled, and said he now knew what it felt like to live inside of a pack of gum. I reveled in my newly unblocked sinuses and lamented the fact that it hadn’t worked on my ear.

With only half of my hearing ability and none of my smelling ability, San Francisco International Airport was a softer experience. Once I checked my bags and was waiting at my gate, it was almost pleasant to effortlessly block out most of the chatter.

Shaw, Washington, D.C. taken by Carolyn Freeman

I landed at Dulles International Airport at 1 in the morning. My dad picked me up and we circled the Washington Monument on our way home to the suburbs, skirting Virginia and DC proper. The monument glowed in the moonlight, its white brick reflecting the easy, smiling night. No one was around. American flags rustled in the wind. 100 pounds of suitcases sat behind us.

Dulles was one of the last pictures I posted for brutalist Wednesday before running off to the land of the pastel. With low, sloped, concrete ceilings, long windows, and light you have to squint into, it’s an obvious choice for Instagram. But Dulles wasn’t actually built in the brutalist style. It’s modernist, a similar architectural style, but one with more gentleness and fewer harsh angles. The truth is that I wasn’t, and still am not, devoted enough to the intricacies of brutalism to care about the exact classification of the buildings I post. In that way, I am a concrete opportunist. I am malleable.

I chose to come back east because the concreteness of brutalist architecture means I have fewer choices to make. I couldn’t predict the palm trees blowing in the breeze and the fog creeping over Golden Gate Park, or the ten degree difference in temperature between Haight-Ashbury and the Mission, where the sun actually shines. I choose familiarity. I choose a city of concrete, where the temperature is the same in every neighborhood, where I will never again be shocked by a ninety-degree hill on the way to get pizza. My last act of freedom, then, was feeling the bright intake of peppermint air, the recklessness of a ruined shop floor, and the knowledge that all cities are built on concrete.

In Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch there are a wife and husband, Talita and Traveler. When they wake up in the mornings, they tell each other their dreams, “head to head, caressing each other, mingling hands and feet.” In the retelling, Traveler sifts over the dreams like a priest examining entrails, compulsively searching for “correspondences” between their two nights. Unsurprisingly, Traveler is disappointed, frustrated again and again by “the impassable barrier, the dizzy distance that not even love could leap.”

One morning, he finds a small similarity. In her dream, Talita had been in a hotel where she had to bring her own chair. In his, Traveler, also in a hotel, had been forced to bring his own towel. Talita laughs at him, rightly: his evidence is laughable. Firmly in the realm of the conspiracy theorist and statistician, Traveler aches for patterns to function as proof.

“Traveler kept on hoping and waiting less and less…. He lost his faith that what he wanted could happen, and he knew that without faith it would not happen. He knew that without faith nothing that should happen would happen, and with faith almost never either.”

What Traveler wants is not, I think, unusual or unfamiliar. The parallels he longs to uncover would presumably serve as evidence of love, indicating that two people can become, or are already, a single unbroken whole. Isn’t this something we want, often painfully, from the people we are closest to? (Or perhaps I should say: this is something I want, and I think that sometimes others do too.) There’s a fear of not being understood in all of my richness, and a corresponding desire for an unspoken intimacy. Sometimes, when we have to work at our relationships, they already begin to feel like failures.

My college graduation a year ago is veiled in dreams and drunkenness. Without shelter from the sun, I spent a morning and part of an afternoon sweating in my cap and gown, the ungainly outfit that flattened all the graduates into each other, a blurred black mass breaking up into the world.

I can’t really remember now if I told my friends I’d stay in touch, or how often. I think I didn’t make any unreasonable promises, and neither did anyone else. But even so, a mixture of despair and ecstasy created a kind of fever-pitch within me; I was consumed by a love and sadness that didn’t make sense, felt at one moment as a prematurely distant fondness, at another as a yearning to touch, hug, tell these people around me something—I’m not sure what.

I lingered at my airport gate the next morning, waiting to say goodbye to a friend who happened to be flying out to an opposite coast. In hindsight, the last-minute meeting felt appropriately dramatic, enough of a parting; we’ve exchanged three or four messages since then, and saw each other recently when they were back in town. And it’s the same for plenty of other people that brought me so much joy in college, our interactions now curt and digital, gradually coming to feel obligatory. I often think about how much my friends mean to me; but what do they mean to me, if I can cast them off so easily?

I don’t know what friendship is, or how to do it well, but I sometimes tell myself that the loss of these friends is okay. Relationships have their time and place; it’s unseemly to expect that I won’t grow apart from the vast majority of those I went to college with. In that way, the entire experience, the broken-up mass of people too vast and ungainly to keep track of, folds itself neatly into my own instructive conclusion.

Increasingly, my experiences with family or friends are riddled with disjunctions, moments in which I am reminded that there are aspects of them that are closed off to me. Like Traveler, I’m frustrated. We can’t dream the same dreams, and yet I persist in searching for signals of confluence, parallel tracks of thought, natural intimacy. Why is this gradual awareness of discontinuity disappointing to me? My mother once told me with pride that my father and his best friend would often choose similarly colored outfits; rather than a referendum on the comical limits of the male fashion sense, it was a symbol of their unintentional, easy closeness.

I would like to feel that somebody really understands something essential and unchanging about me. Any fumble with a friend I haven’t seen in a while becomes evidence that we did not have the right kind of friendship to begin with.

Agnès Varda’s Vagabond begins with the corpse of the titular character, Mona Bergeron, frozen to death in a vineyard ditch. An unnamed, mysterious narrator soon appears; while she never explicitly shows up in the film, she oversees the reconstruction of Mona’s last days through interviews with the people Mona encountered.

“I always imagined she came from the sea,” says the narrator, as the camera shows a nude, shimmering figure walking onto a beach, the first shot of a living Mona. A moment later, the shot pans out, and we see that Mona is being watched by two men on a motorbike. Here is the first instance of the unrelenting male gaze through which much of Mona’s story is filtered, in her interactions with truck drivers, agronomists, fellow vagabonds.

These men’s reflections on the brief relationships, or encounters, they have with Mona make clear that the movie’s motive is not to present us with a true retelling of Mona’s life. The point is, there cannot be: the tragedy is that it’s too late for her to tell it. The best we can do is piece it together out of recollections, and those, in turn, will always drag something else reluctantly into the picture.

What is that something else? A man she spends a few days with in an abandoned chateau whines “I thought she was the staying type,” after she abruptly disappears. (This, mind you, is the same man who wears a padlock-necklace and described himself as a “Wandering Jew.”) A philosophy-PhD-turned-shepherd tries to get her to plant a row of potatoes at the farm he shares with his wife. When she vanishes again, he sneers that she doesn’t understand that her rebellion against society is meaningless without building something in its place. A woman in an unhappy relationship, seeing Mona and the Wandering Jew asleep together, imagines them as happy lovers.

It happens to us too as, gently and obstinately, the structure of Vagabond leads us back to Mona’s death. Watching the scenes spliced together by the narrator, we draw out significance, unravel meaning, seize on words and gestures, find points of inflection and moments of revelation. In other words, we identify the site of infection, where and when the fungus began to cause the rot that leads to her death. And in doing so, we, too, enter the frame.

Vagabond reveals how fragile our perception of others often are. We are liable to twist them to serve our own purposes. The stranger on the road, Mona, is an extreme example—what do we owe to her, after all?—but it exists everywhere. Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with the famous line “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”; the unspoken corollary is that everybody else becomes a character in those stories.

How do these ideas fit together? I want a feeling of truth in my friendships—a closeness whose most absurd incarnation is found in Traveler—but I am constantly foiled by my own selfishness, the violent way I instrumentalize the people I encounter, turning them into foils and mirrors for myself. We need others, but we can hardly ever get our encounters right because the effort is so often self-involved.

In certain moods, once you start to think about your relationships along these unforgiving lines, it becomes difficult to stop. After quitting my soccer team, I sometimes worried that I only remained friends with some of the people on it because it reinforced a particular, vain image I’d had of myself as a teenager, of someone both athletic and intelligent. So how do we forge better relationships, make sure that we’re not just deluding ourselves into sopping self-satisfaction?

One temptation—at least, after college—is to say that perhaps academic conversation is a place where better encounters can happen, when we must put forth an opinion out to test it against others and find the truth that lies somewhere outside of and between us. But I’m not interested in turning my life into a sharp-tongued seminar, at least not always. I am interested in figuring out how to make the attempt, when encountering the sharp edge of difference, of seeing it for what it is, and appreciating it fully as something distinct from me. What is the virtue, or habit, that will help me act well in this way?

In Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” we might find something like an answer. The novella begins at Weatherend, located somewhere vaguely in the English countryside. There, John Marcher, a man vaguely situated somewhere in the British upper classes, is sure that he is re-encountering a woman named May Bartram, though he’s not sure when he first met her—her face is “a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance.”

They find themselves drawn together; then it strikes Marcher where he has seen May Bartram before: “‘Years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it.’” His triumph is quickly undercut, as she promptly corrects all of the details he offers up: They didn’t meet in Rome, but Naples; it was ten years ago, not seven; he wasn’t accompanying the Pembles, but the Boyers; they weren’t at the Palace of the Caesars, but Pompeii, “present there at an important find.”

A little while into the encounter, Marcher is already fashioning a regretful narrative about it, indulging in the idea that some opportunity for closer friendship has been lost to circumstance, and the fact there is nothing that really connects them to each other. “He would have liked to invent something, get her to make believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred,” James writes.

Just when he has neatly wrapped up their interaction, however, she says: “You know you told me something that I’ve never forgotten and that again and again has made me think of you since.” She then explains that, “on that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento,” he revealed to her what he calls “the Beast in the Jungle”: the great fear that’s lurked around him his whole life. In May’s words:

“You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious or terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”

Marcher says he still feels this way, as if his life’s been marked out for something awful. The result is that he’s isolated himself from the rest of the world; he’s so burdened, in his own mind, by the strange experience of the Beast in the Jungle that he’s unable to forge lasting or meaningful relationships with others. But the fact that he once told May Bartram about it seems to him to be something he might “profit” by, in part because it will help alleviate his feeling of solitude. As a result, he asks her if she will “watch” with him to see what happens to him, which she agrees to do.

The novella proceeds from there, over the course of many years, as Marcher and May Bartram become each other’s primary companions. It’s in this relationship—the way both people revolve around a single pole within it, founded on Marcher’s obsessive sense of foreboding—that there is perhaps a lesson for friendship.

Marcher describes his friendship with May as a relief, because it allows him to be “just a little” selfish. In his interactions with other people, he thinks of himself as “decently—as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely—unselfish” because he doesn’t want to disturb people “with the queerness of having to know a haunted man.” Of course, being caught up in a near-pathological self-absorption isn’t what it means to be unselfish; Marcher is making a mistake, confusing egoistic passivity with genuine regard for other people. (Orson Welles once described his loathing of Woody Allen this way: “He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is ­unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably ­arrogant.”)

In contrast, there are two things about May Bartram that set her apart from Marcher. The first is the attention she pays to his circumstances, to helping him try to figure out exactly what the Beast in the Jungle is. That is, she lives up to her original promise of “watching” with him, with the special kind of scrutiny the word implies. “That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that people often couldn’t have made out themselves,” Marcher observes. Laying aside the explicitly gendered claims of this sentence, the point being made here is that there are times when we cannot reach self-knowledge except with the help of others who pay attention to us in a particular way.

Marcher’s conclusion is that “she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet.” Of course, it’s precisely this attitude that prevents her from actually being useful to him. The years pass without anything particularly awful taking place—in fact, without much of anything at all taking place. Eventually, May Bartram becomes fatally ill with a mysterious blood disease. During one of their last conversations, Marcher confronts her with a suspicion: that she knows what the Beast is, but refuses to tell him.

Her response is to stand up and walk over to him:

“She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. ‘It’s never too late.’ She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken…She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.”

Why doesn’t she simply tell him? In the last sentence of the passage above—“she only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited”—the subject shifts between the two clauses, from May Bartram to Marcher. The suggestion, from James’s prose and May Bartram’s action, is that there is a similar shift in agency: it becomes incumbent upon Marcher to do or understand something he has not previously understood. Why doesn’t she simply tell him? Because she understands, in her love for him, that she can lead him to the edge of self-knowledge, but that he must discover it for himself.

This is the second instructive feature found in her character; unlike the confessional mode of someone like Traveler, her love for Marcher takes the form of respect for the fact of his difference, an understanding that she can only lead him to the cliff’s-edge of understanding—he must jump off himself. The tragedy of the story is that he cannot understand this, in part because he treats her as a means to his own good, thereby eliminating the possibility that she might actually function as such a means.

But it should also be clear, from the story, that May Bartram is forced to be martyrish, hemmed in by the expectations of patriarchy. Though her behavior can in some ways function as a model—in much the same way as a saint’s—the extremity of her self-abnegation is both unattainable and unhealthy for most of us.

That’s okay. The majority of people don’t exactly have the leisurely privilege of spending so much time with our friends. Instead we’re beset by the demands of a world that often feels set on obliterating any relation—anything beyond mere friendly acquaintance—we might try to forge with others. Unselfish, mutually attentive friendship can’t function as a wholesale antidote to systemic oppression and exploitation, but it might nevertheless be true that the possibility of systemic change will require us to reconfigure our relationships with one another along lines of love or care.

John Marcher’s story ends in front of May Bartram’s gravestone, when he realizes that, in his ever-present anticipation of an unknown horror, he’s missed the entirety of his life. He’s become “the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” He also understands that loving May Bartram would have been his escape—“then he would have lived.”

In the mid-twentieth century, the psychoanalyst D.H. Winnicott articulated the concept of the good-enough mother. In its brand new finitude, an infant has constant needs, none of which it can really fulfil without the help of its parents. It is therefore to a certain extent omnipotent: mewl after milk, and a nipple, real or artificial, is proffered. The child thereby develops a sense of reality, the feeling that it can make things happen in the world. But the parent is not all-accommodating; to meet the infant’s every need would foster a pathological identification between the child and its environment. So parents fail sometimes, and Winnicott not only forgives them, but suggests that it is for the best, is indeed an imperative of parenting. (“The mother’s eventual task is gradually to disillusion the infant.”) The healthy human moderates between a feeling of creative power and an awareness of its limits.

Last summer, one of my roommates moved to Austria, where he taught English in a town outside Vienna. I was separated from someone who had been grafted firmly onto my life, a limb attached and lost over the course of a couple of years. Our relationship gradually reconfigured itself along digital lines; we have long Messenger conversations and phone calls during which we tell each other about ourselves. It’s strange to willingly vivisect myself in this way for the benefit of an alien consciousness, displaying my anxious and joyful innards.

When we lived together, my friend often said he felt as if our apartment were developing a mythology. I always understood that to be a way of investing the ordinary—an evening watching The Player, teaching him to cook shakshuka—with a giddy, unjustified importance. I loved him for it, but in the wake of our separation I also love him for the opposite reason: the fact that, in speaking with him, I’m forced to confront my self-delusion and deception in a way I could never accomplish on my own. And I try to do the same for him, and hope that I sometimes succeed. We have become good-enough friends—which sounds like a slight, but isn’t.

Winnicott writes that “the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality.” Our friendships, I think, are invaluable in helping with this. When I interned at an office, I often imagined that I had a secret inner life set apart, somehow, from the mundanity of exposed piping and semi-open cubicles. Other times, I wanted someone to shake me and say: enough with this unbearable solipsism. I still don’t really know what friendship is, but I’m often happy to find there are people near me willing to indulge and shake me alternately when it’s necessary.