I have this one friend who believes she's living the movie script version of a life. And I mean it—a friend. I'm not talking about myself in third person.

Anyway, when she feels sad, my friend steps outside her building and expects the sky to open up and pour down on her at that very moment. If there's a street musician on her block, she'll want a melancholy violin song to play just for her. 

This kind of thing does happen to her frequently. I've seen it. And so she can keep on imagining that she is the protagonist of every scene she ever enters.

A month ago, this friend closed the mirrored medicine cabinet in her bathroom and saw the reflection of a stranger standing behind her. She screamed because it wasn't supposed to be that kind of movie, you know? But then the man pulled out a bouquet of flowers and she recognized him.

"Oh!" she said. She had met this man at a business conference in June. At breakfast, he'd touched her hand accidentally at the waffle station and then they'd started talking and didn't stop for three days.

In the bathroom, when he took off his glasses, she saw that he was suddenly gorgeous. They kissed.

They had three wonderful weeks together—a montage—but then they broke up.

I honestly don't know all the specifics, but I think it goes back to that bathroom scene. The tension and the comedic relief, it was all wrong. Plus, the audience was primed to mistrust him. Nobody would ever understand how he had gotten inside her home.    

She called me after the breakup. She was crying but still able to speak in articulate, full sentences. I know she was genuinely sad, but her lines were stale clichés. She'd wanted the two of them "to last," etcetera.  

For years, I have been trying to convince this friend that you can't force a narrative shape to existence. I have told her a thousand times that we are not all heading, every second, toward some quiet epiphany. What I mean is, there is no threshold to cross after which everything changes, everything is different.

Things happen and then other things happen and it is random and not very climactic.

On the phone, I told her a story to illustrate this: I recently reached a point where I felt deeply alone. I took my extra pillow off my bed and I put it out on the curb as a kind of symbolic gesture to the universe. I even sighed heavily as I placed it down by the garbage bins. I was channeling my friend when I did these things, and I told her so.

I was planning to buy a new pillow and after that, I thought I would find a new man to sleep on it beside me. It felt like the right kind of sequence to make things happen.

And what happened instead was this: the garbage men left my pillow out there for weeks. It turned yellowish-green and got moldy and nobody ever touched it. I kept seeing it on the curb, and it made me feel sick.

I did go to buy a new pillow though. In the store, I ended up learning an enormous amount of details about pillows, which I have promptly forgotten, from a pimply teenage employee. His nametag said BRAIN but I called him Brian, just assuming it was a mistake. Anyway, my new pillow is no better or worse than my old pillow. Sometimes, I try to miss the old pillow—maybe its smell or something?—but I don't, not really.  The end.

My friend heard only half of my story. When I finished, she said, "A pillow isn't enough."

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

"You'd need something bigger. Next time try your whole mattress. Maybe also your bedframe. Then that just might work."

She hung up without saying goodbye.

I held the receiver while the sun set. I was still holding it as the room faded to darkness then a darker darkness then black.

Read her postcard.





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