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Single, Married, Divorced, Single…and AI
It was a party of broken men, soft in their distress. Pressed into chairs, propped against walls as if molting from the inside. Befuddled was how they struck me — the separating and separated, the divorcing and divorced. Their psychic pain a miasma everyone agreed to ignore.
Linda, the apartment manager, wearing her black-and-white #23 jersey, made animated introductions amid Super Bowl party chatter. No matter how fast renters moved in and out of the one-hundred-unit complex she knew everyone by name and introduced me to Bob, a slim, buff man of average height, a researcher of infectious diseases. He asked about her jersey.
“It’s custom,” she said, then turned to show the back. “My friends all call me Sapphire.” She laughed for no reason, opening her mouth so wide I could see her back teeth, the ones that are hard to clean. I found myself smiling almost as wide before she jumped up to greet the latest arrivals.
Bob and I sat.
“They’re so upbeat,” he said, referring to the manager and her assistant. “I filled out an application six months ago, thought things were going to…” He paused for me to fill in the blank.
The relationship pre-end, I thought. So hard to make a clean break.
