Toward the end of the film, Sophie began to think of her own parents. Of how, despite the fact that they’d fought all their lives, they’d always taken care of each other. That they would continue to take care of each other until the very end was beyond question, and to some degree, Sophie told me, she had always lived in the shelter of that assumption, of what it meant not only about her parents but about love, about people in general. But now she understood that she herself had chosen differently. Other things had been important to her when she was younger, and as a result she’d chosen a man who—though he was many things to her—would never have the capacity to take care of her if she ceased to be able to take care of herself.

When the movie was over and they walked back outside into the sunlight, she knew then that something much bigger had ended. And not long after that, she told Ezra that it was over, that she couldn’t marry him.

Sophie smiled a crooked half smile now, and looked out past the barbed wire to the smudged gray sea. Then she shrugged her bony shoulders and lifted her empty palms skyward, as if to gesture at the absurdity—though which aspect of it she was referring to, I couldn’t say. The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could ever be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one’s life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?

I wasn’t there when her end came. I was standing in line somewhere, or searching for a connection, or looking for water, or waiting.

In the Garden

In the Garden