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Not a picture of Courtney Cox

"You have to behave yourself," my mother warns. "Amber, too."

It did not occur to me, in meeting Bryan's possible girlfriend, I would have to behave. My wife and I are invited not for our stellar company but as buffers against someone who might be interested in Bryan. I do not know what form my supposed misbehavior might take. I am easygoing unless I find it too funny not to be.

Monica is from Wisconsin. Bryan has no wife, child, pet, or house--at least two of those sound like terrible ideas for him--so nothing that might stop him from flying to one convention or another throughout the continental United States.

Julie

I keep this image behind my eyelids, which occasionally resembles who I am in the mirror, but never in pictures. I cannot swear that the two have ever converged, if I have ever looked in fact as I do in assumption.

I read that the milestones of age come at forty-four and some year in one's seventies--I did not pay attention to which, though I have a vague feeling it was seventy-three; anyway, far enough off that I can be permitted the sacrament of not paying attention. Forty-four, however, was pressing and present.

Are we happy?

I would not want to move twice. Granted, to varying degrees, I have moved seven times, but none of those moves felt as onerous as this one.

For one thing--and not a small one--this is our house. It is not another apartment where, no matter how cozy we make it, we can never totally be at ease. In our apartment, which we had lived in for over ten years, we had bags containing removed aerators and closet doors that would one day need a reunion. Amber had put frosted appliques on the exterior windows and painted the bathroom — the latter of which could not survive the latent water damage in the ceiling that concerned none of the landlords enough. Our apartment was never meant to be a home, though we had neighbors who preceded and outlasted us. After we leave, I assure Amber that the rental company--whoever that is now--will gut it, and not only because it now needs electric heat. We will receive the whole of our deposit in deference to getting rid of us so they can jack up the rent. We could have left it with torn-up carpet and holes in the wall, and they would have happily written us a check.

There is no way I actually look like this

My body is mine - I am its partner for the rest of my life - but it is not me and does not look as I imagine it should. It is not a matter of aging. Those signs I see persist in being minor. Those I spy when the mirror reflection or I lean down near the webcam while teaching startle me, but I do all I can to obviate these.

I sometimes recognize that person as me in front-facing mirrors. In posed selfies, likewise. When the photograph is taken surreptitiously, it is of a goofy alien who has taken my place.

Years ago, Amber snapped a picture of me pumping gas, looking vacantly at the increasing price. I wore a forest green coat and slouched against the car. The background photos on my phone are of Amber, one a caricature and the other fresh from the hair appointment, where they went shorter than a pixie cut. On the computer, they are posing with a statue. This other Amber, their long hair, supposedly never to return. Turnabout being fair play, Amber made the gas-pumping picture their background because they genuinely liked it. When I objected, voicing my discomfort of looking that way, they deleted the photo. I've never been their background since.

Disconnected now

"Maybe this relationship doesn't serve you anymore," Amber says. "Maybe they aren't giving you what you need."

I look at my wife, startled. I had been complaining about a friend, not for the first time, upset about how they seemed to cast me in a role they could fight rather than someone for whom they cared. Looking back, this is not the first time they have done this, glaring at the caricature they saw in place of me. It has been a thread woven through our interactions, usually thin but simple to trace through the tapestry.

It is not a judgment on the person's worth--nor mine when they ghosted--only that the relationship was no longer healthy and no longer served us. It recontextualizes losing the close friendship with people I once loved. As Neruda said, "We of that time are no longer the same." I miss not them, not the person they are now, but the relationship we once had. It could be something else, less intense and transmuted, but our fondness was finite and conditional. Why taint that by clinging to something that cannot return?

My community

Again, my online diary is not the place for polemics; it is a chronicle of my thoughts and experiences for posterity. I indulge a fantasy that some of these entries will one day prove evidential for biographers or historical analyses after I am no longer around to give testimony. As I've said, it is beyond my capabilities or desires to convince someone who does not believe as I do or encourage one who does.

That said, the personal is political. My life and love have become an act that ostensibly requires a flurry of executive orders from a man who said he would be a dictator on day one and has proved it many times over. Trump rapidly puts into policy--into black and white with no nuance--that my friends and family, that my spouse, lack "honesty, humility, [...] and integrity" for who they love or are. This from a man who pled bone spurs rather than being drafted, who lies so much that fact-checkers lose count, who cheated on his pregnant wife with an adult actress, who was civilly ruled to have committed a sexual assault (and boasted of these, so why this was a surprise is beyond me). He demands loyalty pledges from members of the government. Not to the Constitution or the country, but the "MAGA agenda," eerily similar to the Heritage Foundations' Project 2025, which Trump swore he had never read but can parrot. Elon Musk did a Nazi salute--and even his defenders refuse to reenact this "innocent, awkward" gesture anywhere they can be recorded.