cecily and alexander

Two friends, on lack of sheep.

Cecily: I have no sheep in my apartment.

Charles: Where do you get your wool from? How do you stay warm in the winter?

Cecily: Harrods’ cashmere.

Charles: But do your blankets and throws offer you unconditional love and, more importantly, loyalty?

Cecily: No, but my Italian greyhound does.

Two friends, on carrots.

Cecily: My grandfather suggested carrots as a cure for insomnia, and it works for me.

Arnaud: I will try them tonight!

Cecily: To improve their efficacy, talk to the carrots while you’re cooking them, or sing. I believe they like folk.

Arnaud: They will have rock, but not The Smashing Pumpkins. That would offend them.

Cecily: I beg to differ. I think the carrots should be at war with the pumpkins. Pumpkins make a better purée and you’d better believe they make a better velouté.

Two friends, on traffic lights.

Arnaud: You are a traffic light. If there were more traffic lights like you, road safety would dramatically increase. Cars would come to a standstill!

Cecily: If traffic lights sashayed around the streets with a complete disregard for cars, we’d all think we were living in Rome.

Alexander, on old authors.

Alexander: I keep reexamining the words of old authors I love in the hope of finding some semblance of clarity and comfort in their familiarity; yet it’s all for naught, and my ongoing stare-down with the Void has become more treacherous than ever.

Two friends, on a poetic life.

Cecily: Foster is a young man I met at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. He was such a gentle soul, and an inspiring one. I didn’t think to ask his last name, and he doesn’t know mine. When we parted it felt romantic not to swap details, but now I feel a sense of loss. The only way I could think to contact him again was to leave a note on the literary board in Shakespeare and Company, where he goes all the time to read and to hide his photographs in the pages of their books as a kind of art quest for the public.

Charles: Oh God. Do you ever do things that aren’t poetic?

Two friends, on escalators.

Charles: There is something very soothing about this escalator.

Cecily: At the end of a tough day, do you go up and down it and feel like you’re in a narrow, metallic womb? And is Freud’s escalator anything like Schrödinger’s box?

Charles: Well it’s certainly a space where there is only one logical direction and no choice. I think you’d quite benefit from Freud-Shrödinger’s escalator.

Two friends, on shirking identity.

Charles: I do not want to be Charles anymore.

Cecily: Charles has light and shade. Sometimes he’s so dryly drôle, at other times wracked with deep malaise, at other times, he simply makes dad jokes. You’re a universe. Don’t deny the world your universe. What does it matter if being Charles hurts you a little? You don’t keep long-term friendships anyway.