Pablo is a translator. An interpreter, actually. He explained to me, that night on the couch, how the movement toward inclusive usage in his language entails the transformation of each adjective and pronoun, through use of a new suffix or ending—an adjustment he contrasts to our targeted substitutions (such as “they” and “are”). I wasn’t sure I liked Pablo, but he had things to teach me; this was clear from that evening and from others too. I liked my friend, very much, but she took off for a new life after discovering that the frequency and duration Pablo was ready to offer weren’t enough.

Pablo is also gone now, but for different reasons. He is needed.

When I wrote about the bodega owner closing up shop, did you picture a person? How detailed was your picture? Did you make decisions, subconscious or not, about hair color, skin color, general size and shape? If I had been more careful in my sentence construction and avoided the use of the pronoun “he,” would you have pictured a person of unknown or non-categorical gender? What does that person look like?

Part of the love philosopher’s annotation—typed into a comment bubble in the margin of the syllabus I’d sent—included a description of his ongoing dispute with the author of the article on Love in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

He begged me to keep the details confidential, but I am permitted to say that the argument comes down to a foundational difference in the two philosophers’ approaches to taxonomy: the author of the article envisions a finite set of categorical distinctions, and so devises those distinctions to cover a prescribed territory beyond which all is dark, while my love philosopher sees no trouble with an open-ended schema—in fact, sees the open-endedness of the schema as itself foundational. It’s an argument only philosophers would have with each other.

From the point of view of real-life researchers of love, there’s only one side of this schism: the side of the unknown, of risk, of that loss and uncertainty that tie themselves, in both expert and amateur knots, to invention.

I compose a message to the list outlining the debate, not expecting an immediate response. While I’m writing, a couple seated at the table next to me in the café (on the fourth corner, opposite the bodega, the playground, and the apartment) argues in a language I don’t know. The couple display an asymmetry: one face stained with contempt and retreat, the other lined with the traces of too much disappointed hope. A stray dog takes pity on the hopeful one, allowing itself to be illicitly, gratefully fed.

I hit Send and shut down, wondering what exactly an open-ended schema would mean.

THE SEASONS CHANGE