"My distress was not about electoral politics. It was more abstruse than that. For decades, all the ways in which Lia was unlike me had brightened and balanced my world. She had always been benevolent with her social ease, including me in every part of her selfhood. But then she became rich, married the painfully dull Gor, and bought a house, and the Lia I'd long known slowly diminished. I realized that she had been laying away plans to depart our shared universe all along. I was becoming an accessory, an artifact of her past; she was making her own way, going somewhere I could not follow. This ---her baby, her new blood family--- would calcify the change. Our private subjectivities would diverge. There were so many names for the…