Today at lunch...

...I sat with another new person, Kelly. She said that she came here from an apartment complex. Her next door neighbor was a nice-looking young man she sometimes thought she might get to know better, but the two of them could never seem to make eye contact in the hall. Even when they rode the elevator together, she said, they barely looked at each other and they never spoke.

"Sometimes I wonder how money changes relationships," Kelly told me.
"Do you think it changed that one?" I asked her.
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe if he'd sprung for a louder bathroom fan or I'd invested in a quieter vibrator, things would not have been so weird when we saw each other. But I just don't know."



Some days the cruelty of this wall is breathtaking; some days it seems like a gift to have it there, keeping what's on the other side invisible and inaudible.
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