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Fiction

Being-With-Significant-Others

Sebastian Richardson eavesdrops on Martin Heidegger’s relationship counselling.

It was the last night of a short weekend visit to Denver, and my old college roommate Paul and I were holed up in his apartment with a half-gallon of cheap Canadian whiskey. My girlfriend was back in Washington spending the weekend with a dog she adopted a year ago with her ex-boyfriend. Paul’s partner was at an academic conference in Kansas, where she was giving a talk on the notion of alterity in the early works of Nikolai Gogol. This was the first weekend that either I or Paul had spent away from our significant others in nearly five months, so naturally we spent the entire time drinking, chain-smoking, playing drunken matches of ping pong, and endlessly expatiating about our relationship gripes and our paradoxically concomitant hopes and other romantic musings. Such preoccupations were the cause of deep discontentment on both of our parts, and the more we drank, the more the anxieties began to gush forth.

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