Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 - 11:54 a.m.
He folds his laptop screen down because he suddenly has a thought - she too is a writer. If not in the formal sense that he sees himself, but one nonetheless. He remembers that she once told him she kept a journal, a book with pages filled with her neat, girlish handwriting.
Suddenly, there are now two versions of the same event. He wonders if she was writing in her journal at the exact moment when he was typing. In his version, he broke the rules of friendship by telling her he liked her, because he could not be dishonest to her. He cannot lie, even though he can be remarkably good at it.
But now there is a competing narrative. He wonders how she described that night outside the Substation on Armenian Street, a night ripe like any other night for a confession. Did she see it as an end of a friendship, the inverse of their first meeting? He thinks about the adjectives she might have used to describe him. Romantic and intense? But more likely - an asshole and a shit stirrer.
Perhaps in her book, the are no pages at all to describe the incident, not even a single line. Maybe she skips that day, or leaves a page blank. Perhaps then, to her he is nothing. He thinks it eminently logical, for two people to describe the same exact incident in completely different ways.
So she is a different kind of writer, one who so succinctly captured the moment by writing nothing. Next to his screen full of detached, post-ironic text, her writing, her singular blank page - is truthful.
