In Haruki Murakami’s novel “ 1Q84,” a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in.
In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed.