
I routinely ignore these things, but he caught me in a weak moment. My only relationship was heavily one-sided, between me and the lordly Russian physical therapist who, twice weekly, rolled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, squirted lotion on my shoulder, and pressed on it with his gloved hands, relieving the intense nerve pain that I had suffered for months. I adored him.
Maybe the preponderance of flowers and cityscapes, and the dearth of human beings, on my feed had tipped off my admirer. A follower had pointed it out: "You don't have people in your posts."That's because I don't have people in my life, bitch.
So I was vulnerable. I wrote back that I never took the bait, and he apologized for intruding on my privacy and backed off, which made me write, "No, it's O.K., I will make an exception."
He was a widower who had lost his wife to cancer and his only son in a hideous boating accident. He had twin grandsons: "They are my life." He was working with a team at the U.N. to find a cure for COVID. He lived in Florida but was soon leaving for Paris. He asked for a photo. Oh, well, what the hell... I was on my way to physical therapy, looking rumpled, but I took a quick selfie, and if you enlarged it, and had a large heart, you could see that my eyes were quite comely. He responded quickly, saying I was lovely. I thought it was about time someone noticed.
Esta historia es de la edición July 22, 2024 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición July 22, 2024 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar

SUBJECT AND OBJECT
What happened when Lillian Ross profiled Ernest Hemingway.

ROYAL FLUSH
The fall of red.

Roz Chast on George Booth's Cartoons
There's almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze.

CHUKA
I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Sometimes we live for years with yearnings that we cannot name.

Rachel Aviv on Janet Malcolm's "Trouble in the Archives"
As Janet Malcolm worked on \"Trouble in the Archives,\" a two-part piece about prominent psychoanalysts who disagreed about Freud, she began a correspondence with Kurt Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives.

PERSONAL HISTORY - A VISIT TO MADAM BEDI
I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.

AMERICAN CHRONICLES - WAR OF WORDS
Editors, writers, and the making of a magazine.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK
A new docuseries commemorates fifty years of \"Saturday Night Live.\"

TANGLED WEB
An arachnophobe pays homage to the spider.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Mike White's mischievous morality plays.