Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Accelerated intimacy, that’s what Zoe was good at. She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends.

They call this “temp to perm.” I love this phrase. Not only is it palindrome adjacent, it is extremely useful. All situations in life fall into one of these two categories. For example, the fact you are thirty-seven years old and currently live with your mother in New Jersey, I remind myself, is temp. But the shape of your chin is, sadly, perm.

Talking to his mother bewildered him. He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt by her; the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed.

They ate because they felt less alone when eating. Because they wanted to feel full, then wanted to feel nothing. Dominique said it was like that Bruce Springsteen song “Hungry Heart” from the 1980s. Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.