David Boyd

Why people don’t print money when they’re broke.

Just seeing you, though, I feel, I dunno, happamine.”

Nine winters ago—on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday, at a little after eleven, I decided to go out for a walk.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea, but as I sat there, watching yet another uneventful birthday coming to an end, I had the sudden desire to go out and walk around. Sure, it would probably have been nice to bring a cake home (my birthday is Christmas Eve, so the city was full of cakes), or have a conversation with somebody, but going for a walk was the only thing that came to mind that I could do on my own

Because at night, only half the world remains.”

It isn’t anything, but it’s so beautiful that I could cry.

The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.

“Sometimes you can be okay with something, then the next day comes and it’s a totally different story.”

At first, my coworkers invited me out for dinner or drinks, but I always declined, offering a string of vague excuses, and at some point they stopped asking. Before I knew it, I’d been left entirely alone.

Once I was spending all of my time alone, not talking to anyone, I started to hear people whispering about me at odd moments in the day. A few of my coworkers even used a secret language that they thought I didn’t understand to talk about me right in front of me, making jokes at my expense. Once this had become normal, they started asking me all kinds of nosy questions that had nothing to do with work. Aren’t you going to get married? Why not? What do you do on your days off?

Like, if you make plenty of money but don’t have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman. You know what I mean?