I might not miss you

On the heels of Carabosse comes I might not miss you, a very different story from its predecessor. Sex does figure in it, I suppose, but more as a topic to avoid than to dissect.

The subject of “I might not miss you” is friendship, and that perennial, shopworn, aching question: Can men and women be friends? I’m not sure what answer it comes to; I think it’s a tentative, wistful, cautious “yes”, but with caveats.

This story’s real-world antecedent is my friendship with Penny. Penny and I have been good friends since we met about four years ago, and best friends for the last two years, but now things are strained and wary and far too silent. Though I wrote the story a year ago, its appearance now is quite timely.

One of the ideas I was trying to get at, and which the editors of The Summerset Review bring forward quite nicely with their graphic in the section breaks, is the way this sort of friendship necessarily depends on lines that never intersect. Although it seems as if Penny and I could talk to each other about anything, there were always big areas of our lives that we edited out. And it was this process of editing that put the current strain on our friendship.

The story tries to illustrate these parallel lines in its narrative style: a sort of omniscient voice that moves back and forth between the two characters, aware of the thoughts they share but equally aware of the wall between them. That wall of consciousness, the solipsistic trap of the human mind, exists in all our important relationships, but it is especially solid in a friendship between a man and a woman. Its bricks are fashioned out of the differences–whether socially or psychologically or biologically constructed may not matter–between the sexes. And the mortar, carefully tended to on both sides, is made of the fears we have about damaging various hearts, others’ and our own. In a very good friendship the wall may have quite a few windows, and occasional gaps that we leave open a little longer than we should, but the heart’s stonemasons don’t rest for very long.

In the story, both parties leave with their respective sides of the wall meticulously reinforced. In the real world, I hope to at least get a few of the old windows put back in.