She Loved Me Not

Shortly after leaving Canada for Brooklyn half a decade ago, Tree Abraham responded to a Craigslist ad for an opening in a four-bedroom apartment. A week after moving in, one roommate joined her for the first of many craft nights to come. The book designer recalls their early friendship with nostalgia and curiosity. Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, the two bonded while watching TV, sketching, folding laundry, and doing crossword puzzles. “We are floor people,” she writes of the shared habit that made them inseparable. “When the world is too much, we lie on floor.” Eight months into her lease, Abraham suddenly — like a “thunderclap” on her twenty-eighth birthday — felt her platonic feelings change. She endured the “bodily distress” of a crush for seven days. When she finally confessed, the feeling was not mutual.

“Telling you was the beginning of / an odyssey,” Abraham says in the opening pages of Elseship, an experimental memoir that excavates a dynamic that resists clean-cut definition: strangers turned housemates turned friends, with a one-sided lovesickness thrumming beneath the surface. “There isn’t a word for that,” but Abraham desperately wanted to find one. So she set off on a fact-finding mission — like “a pilgrim peregrinating for words”— to describe what was happening under their shared roof. In this quest, she likens herself to a mudlark who sifts through sand for valuables, “plucking phrases and ideas and new sensations of the self out of changing environs.”

Elseship is a moving meditation on different types of love and how we represent them. Illustrations, photos, sketches, and scanned notes are interspersed between ruminations on the year following the admission, when the two were stuck in ambiguity. Abraham reaches for “definitions, metaphors, memories, moments, feelings” to create a “-ship” all her own. It is not a typical scenario, she admits: “I know which love stories get written about, and they are not mine — a story about a first love that is not heterosexual or sexual, and at times not even reciprocal.”

To inform her encyclopedic study, Abraham relies on eight ancient Greek categories of love: agape, philautia, ludus, philia, eros, mania, pragma, and storge. Ranging from universal, friendship, and sexual to familial love, these ideas provide structure to the idiosyncratic narrative.

In her chapter on agape —“a boundless altruism toward all humans, nature, and/or the divine”— Abraham describes the importance of art and travel. In the one on philautia —“a self-love”— she considers the “abnormal” ease with which she became “fiercely independent,” while also divulging how much she struggled with asexuality and dating. Structurally, several digressions make for a slow start to the larger investigation in question. But as the book progresses, they give the reader a more complete look at the writer herself, along with the person who inspired such fervent research.

It is not until the chapter on mania —“an obsessive, dramatic, jealous lust often at the beginning of a relationship”— that we begin to understand how the pair’s friendship is both tortuous and symbiotic. “Your lack of adoration and expression comes off as unimpressed,” Abraham writes. “I am terrified that I am not smart, spontaneous, discerning, noble, or funny enough.” In contrast to Abraham’s open-heartedness, the unnamed housemate avoids connection: “I reach to comfort you, your immediate response is to push me away, or disappear into your room.”

In a compelling passage, Abraham considers possible clinical explanations for her heartache: Could it be addiction or obsession? Maybe limerence, a psychological state of longing? Until she had been “exposed to psychoanalytic trends in therapy,” Abraham was unable to see that “neither of us were operating from healthy states.” Without exposure to “diagnostic modalities,” she had not known how “theories related to trauma, emotional availability, attachment styles, boundaries, and coping mechanisms affected our dynamic.” Today, however, she insists on moving toward forgiveness: “What we were then is all we could manage to be.”

Abraham has an admirable penchant for words. Like Gustave Flaubert, she seeks out le mot juste to define a complicated feeling. At times, this search — reflected in dozens of footnotes and asides — can be as exhausting as it is whimsical. (I admit that, occasionally, I found myself searching futilely for a through line.) Readers will encounter unusual terms — like “ammil,” for a thin film of ice glazing a Devonshire landscape — but not much about the cherished friend. We know she has a “well-maintained shiny brown mane,” which the author lovingly braids, and that she brings home “administrative leftovers” from her work. But she remains, perhaps intentionally, an elusive figure.

“Never have I felt more common yet, in a moment, unrepeatable,” Abraham writes, realizing the universal nature of her singular experience. Some of her most enduring insights are quiet ones, like her attention to “micromoments,” which she defines as the “sips of love” that “become a love-filled life.” With her new-found lexicon for love, she captures the romance of a summertime sleepover on the roof, the fleeting hours spent folding paper cranes, and the resonance of a rhythmic knock on a bedroom door. Ambitious and touching, Elseship is a tender autopsy of a broken heart.