C H E A T
Your husband’s habit of exchanging Instagram Reels with his co-worker might, in fact, reflect a simmering mutual attraction—one that could be fully consummated at their upcoming offsite in Telluride.
B R I N K
Your grouchy grandfather recently survived a heart attack, during which he was technically dead for three full minutes. When he begrudgingly woke up, he had no insights into the beyond. “It’s just black,” he told you, laughing darkly. “It’s nothing.”
A D I E U
It was the nonchalance of it all. The way baba ganoush fell from Charlie’s pita like satellite debris when he announced, “I’d rather die than be the kind of person who proposes at the Eiffel Tower,” between casual bites. The synchronized laughter from Chloe and Helena. It’s been three days and you’re still fighting the urge to Google “best underrated places to propose in Paris reddit.”
T R A I N
Ever since the burly conductor on the 8:03 A.M. express ordered the finance guy to move his briefcase so that you could sit down, you haven’t been able to stop thinking about him, or the way his ringless hand lingered on yours when he took your ticket.
B U I L D
You have four hundred and ninety-nine LinkedIn connections, which is tantalizingly close to the coveted “500+” distinction. Oddly enough, you feel lonelier now than when you had four hundred and ninety-eight LinkedIn connections.
D R E A M
It felt so real: you were back in high school, in gym class, and when Coach Costello mocked your “chicken legs,” instead of suffering silently—as you did in real life—you stabbed him in the throat with a javelin. A butterfly fluttered out of the bleeding wound and flew high into the steely sky. Everyone agreed that the transformation was natural and good.
T I T L E
You were recently promoted to senior customer-satisfaction specialist after resolving the most tickets last quarter. Last night at happy hour, Greg drunkenly pointed out that if customers were truly satisfied, there wouldn’t be any tickets to resolve in the first place. You begin to question if your career is built on a paradox, one in which success is predicated on dissatisfaction.
F R A U D
You work at the asset-management firm that led Just Salad’s latest funding round. But when a “What Do You Do for a Living?” TikToker accosted you on Bleecker Street, you panicked and told him that you’re in the “sustainable-food space.” He grinned and said, “That’s fire!”
F A N C Y
You chose your therapist because he looks like Ryan Gosling, but, six months and almost five thousand dollars later, he doesn’t know a single thing about you because you still spend each session trying to seem effortlessly cool and mysterious.
C R A V E
It’s easy to resent your new upstairs neighbors, whose headboard-thumping intimacy has woken you up four nights in a row. But is it really the lack of sleep that irks you most? Or do their breathy moans remind you of the “lustful desire” that Sarah said your marriage lacked? ♦
