The Things We Don’t Do

I like that we don’t do the things we don’t do. I like our plans on waking, when morning slinks onto our bed like a cat of light, plans we never realize because we get up late from imagining them so long. I like how our muscles tingle from the exercises we enumerate without doing, the gyms we never join, the healthy habits we conjure as if, simply by desiring them, our bodies will glow from their radiance. I like the travel guides you browse with that absorption I so admire, and whose monuments, streets, and museums we will never set foot in, as we sit entranced over our ­coffee. I like the restaurants we don’t go to, the light from their candles, the imagined taste of their cooking. I like the way our house looks when we picture it refurbished, its startling furniture, its lack of...