Me:no
Tristan:cool I’ll be at Tryst doing work tm. Come whenever
Me:ew u meant irl?
Tristan:-_-
Tristan:as much as I wanna keep texting a woman w/ whom i’ve already had multiple misunderstandings my thumbs hurt
Me:omg “w/ whom” is sending meeeeeee. Harvard is calllingggg.
Tristan disliked“omg ‘w/ whom’ is sending meeeeeee. Harvard is calllingggg.”
The tables at Tryst were tight together. A sea of people staring at their laptops, clunky white coffee mugs floating to their lips. Tristan was sitting in the back corner on his laptop. He didn’t see me. I felt less self-assured than I had over text. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked about Harvard calling.
Instead of going up to him, I agonized over the chalkboard menu items, fiddling with my coat buttons. The purple-haired barista said, “Can Ihelpyou?”
“Could I get the lavender hot chocolate and—”
Someone touched my shoulder. “Hey.” It was Tristan.
“Hi.”
The barista asked, “Anything else?”
“I’ll take an apple-cinnamon muffin.”
Tristan handed the woman his card. I pulled out a ball of dirty crumpled cash and held it out to the barista. “Stop being nice to me.”
“I’m not being nice. I’m being sorry.”
The barista looked between us.
I said, “You can put it on his card.”
There were reams of lined paper with terrible handwriting on the table, as well as worn philosophy paperbacks, a black MacBook. “You can move all that over,” Tristan said.
I hung my bag on the back of the chair. “What’re you working on?”
“This moral philosophy paper. I’m also researching this dissertation idea… We don’t start it until like the third year but it takes me a while to get my thoughts together so…”
“What’s the idea?”
“It’s rough, but it’s sort of like how agency isn’t an individual issue, like, your decisions are made inside a system. That doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibility for your actions, but what does that do to your self-esteem when your actions are pit against structures designed to dilute them? Like, slaves who didn’t run away. Technically, they could physically leave but that decision is attached to a violent context that makes it an impossible decision. I wanna look at the connection between agency and depression because that’s depression, right? Feeling like what you do won’t matter in the end, like your actions have no meaning.”
A hole gaped inside me, and a thought of my father slipped through. We didn’t say the word “depression,” but what else did you call the hours strapped to his armchair, drowning in blue light? I often got the tragic sense that he was no one without alcohol, despite his drinking days living on mainly as a fragment of memories: loud footsteps, bumblingabout, eyelids moving like sandbags tied to them. He quit when I was twelve, after nearly three decades. Part of me still believed there was nothing real inside the shell he refused to shed after getting sober, just a wisp of smoke forever falling through my fingers.
I touched the handle of my mug, remembering it in front of me. “Can I read your dissertation?”
“You’re gonna wait six years for it?”
“Why not?”
Tristan’s eyes scraped over me. Feeling cornered by his gaze, I fumbled for the book in my bag just to give my hands something to do.
“What’s that?”
I held up the cover. He read it aloud. “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.Art monster?”
