Summary

It is at an art gallery exhibit, which the narrator admits she attends because there is an open bar, where she first sees Ciaran, a stranger. He is to her less a person, more a presence who strikes the narrator as unassailably cool, “undeniably whole” (3), at once “lovely” and distant, “entirely contained within himself’ (4). To her, he is exotic, half Irish, half Danish. She disparages the idea of love at first sight. Yet she acknowledges that from this first encounter, their first awkward conversation amid the contemporary sculptures that she does not begin to understand, and their subsequent meandering walk together in the Dublin rain, that she “worshiped” him, his body nothing less than a “site for prayer” (5). The narrator admits her life to that point was divided between her public self and her private self. “Living alone, I began to split...