Too Much by Rachel Vorona Cote7/1/2023 Some obscure voice at the back of my head admonished me to wave aside these thoughts, to excuse myself to the bathroom and douse my face. I had reassured myself that this outing was innocent-why not make friends with my new classmates? But as the night drew on and the beer eased my edges, Paul’s own form, though shadowed by the dim light, seemed to solidify before me, peripheries defined, precious matter within a nothing of space. Such was the case when, one fall evening, Paul and I grabbed a beer at a restaurant near campus. I had never found it difficult to maintain platonic male friendships while romantically committed, so I assumed the band on my finger wouldn’t bar friendship now.īut once I acknowledge my attraction to a person, I am almost irrevocably distracted, my awareness totally reoriented by piqued desire and curiosity. After collaborating on a class presentation, I was enthralled, but in a way that seemed chaste, even sisterly. We met in a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century literature: I admired his artful, quick-witted mind and his velvety warm blue eyes. I fell in love with Paul slowly, but easily. I had only been married to my husband, Nick, since August. When I kissed Paul, it was the end of my first, frenzied semester as a doctoral student. In the rearview mirror, my affair, a one-week cataclysm that cracked open the winter of 2010, seems ludicrous and resistant to comprehension: It’s banal in its particulars, yet it was for me both shatteringly ecstatic and distressing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |