24 Reader, have you ever dealt with “guys,” or perhaps just “a guy,” singular? Once you live in a place that is your own, things will go wrong with that place, and to fix it, someone will always be sending over guys. Guys will give you an arrival window. The window will not matter. They will show up forty minutes early, when you are still in your towel, or six hours late, after you’ve had to cancel your plans. Maybe they’ll show up on time, but they’ll be missing a part, or because of some bureaucratic mix-up, they can’t actually install whatever it is they’re installing until Thursday, oh, and also, it’s a holiday weekend, so the washing machine your landlord finally agreed to replace will sit in the middle of your hallway for a week, and every time you pass it you must choose: squeeze past, or vault over? For this, there will be no apology. Here is the real fairy-tale happy ending: A guy that shows up on time, fixes the furnace that same day, and rides off into the night, never to be heard from again.

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER,
or Lessons I Have Learned

I left plenty of time to get to Touchstone’s play. Too much time. A year and a half in New York, and I still didn’t know when to leave, how to budget enough time for trains and buses and walks. Because I disliked being late, it meant that I frequently arrived to places half an hour early, and on this particular occasion—Touchstone’s fall show—I’d forgotten to bring a book, which meant that after texting Oliver to wish him good luck on his new pilot and then Phoebe, promising that I’d pick up milk on the way home, I was left staring around the theater, half-aimlessly listening to people’s conversations and half stressing out about all the work that I had due in the next week.

While Touchstone and Phoebe had carried on in theater, I was majoring in linguistics. I’d always liked languages—the rules, the peculiarities, the curiosities. I was finally around people who wanted to talk about eggcorns as much as I did, who wanted to chew on technicalities and minutia and talk about the absence of certain letters from the French alphabet. Who loved breaking down words in phonemes. Who thought it was fascinating to learn the origin of the cat’s out of the bag and other idiomatic expressions.