When Joseph was two months old, we packed up our Maine apartment to drive back to Maryland, to a house we had barely lived in. Joseph’s age became a proxy for how long my mother had been dead.
In just a couple of weeks I cycled all the way from love listening to episode after episode on long, meditative walks with a stroller and hearing Zahedi’s voice in my head at all other times of day to the other side. I managed to get my husband hooked in the process. He continued to listen every day as the episodes came out, whereas when I caught the distinct cadence of Zahedi’s voice coming out of the fuzzy iPhone speaker from the kitchen, I began to feel embarrassed. For me? For Zahedi? For me for once liking him and for Zahedi for being so . . . needy.
I can’t tell how paranoid I’m being when I wonder if we’re at the beginning of a civil war. When we feel paranoid, we project our fear outward, locating it in details and experiences that would seem otherwise benign. Sometimes this fear is justified; the paranoid fantasy is not always implausible.