In Central Park, there is a couple who don’t know they are. They run past each other, every morning, giving each other the finger, as they run (always) in opposite directions, having gotten at odds for giving each other slights decades ago in which neither can remember how it started or who had started it. Here are words that have been used: asshole, douche-bag, dick wad. And these are grown women now. But back then, when the words were simpler, when nothing had taken much root, they were young college students, not yet twenty. One was an eastsider, the other an outsider. Their fights happened weekly and yet without much traction or luridness. Their confrontations were like drips of water. Bu to them, it had been building and building over the years, like a venerable typhoon. Especially when the Outsider succeeded, made a name for herself in bakery circles, while the Eastsider married, had children, divorced, married again, and divorced again. Their lives never converging but always building.

There was a point, however, when a small fissure developed in their secretive fighting, the tiniest bridge, when the Outsider stuck her finger out, during one of their morning jogs, to show the Eastsider that she was now engaged.  The Eastsider, assuming she was being given the finger, gave one back. Which happened also to have an engagement ring on it.

Neither one of them saw the diamonds. Either they were running too fast, as they usually did, to notice. Or, as was usually the case, they were too blind with rage.