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for a year, so I resolved to knit him a pair of warm socks. We’d been seeing each other for several months, and I liked him, but I knew that he was not my true love and I was relieved that he was moving away, because it meant I wouldn’t have to suffer through an agonizing conversation about how I didn’t want to be his boyfriend. I could just let distance tear us apart.
    Knitting scarves and hats and baby blankets had been all well and good, but socks required an entirely different level of commitment. First, the patterns I’d been using for scarves and hats and baby blankets never called for needles smaller than size six; for the socks I needed size one. Second, where for flat garments I had used two needles, socks required four, which complicated things exponentially. And third, Mike had size-eleven feet—it should be clear why I was dating him—and so knitting his socks took
forever.
I walked around Manhattan carrying a set of four long toothpicks, yarn trailing behind me; the bamboo needles were so thin that every other day I’d break one and have to buy a new set. I used self-patterning yarn, however, which is the closest thing this world has to witchcraft: it’s dyed in such a way that you don’t do a thing but knit it, and the sock you end up with looks like a foot-shaped Rembrandt.
    By the time Mike’s move was at hand, I had finished only one sock of the pair. In the few days I had left, I tried heroically to complete the other, sitting up nights turning the heel and decreasing like mad, but in the end the task was beyond me. The evening before he was to depart for the frozen north—thank God—I gave him the finished sock and an IOU. I knew I was creating the potential for messiness here: if I’d given him both socks, I could have made a clean break, whereas by incurring a debt I risked maintaining a closer connection to him than I wanted. My plan was therefore to finish the companion sock quickly, send it to him, and then e-dump him.
    Unfortunately before I could do so he wrote from Boston asking me what was going on. Were we still boyfriends? Did we have a future? Would I go antiquing with him in the spring? I replied evasively, as was my custom with him. It was not clear to me whether we had ever been boyfriends, I said, I wasn’t sure whether we had a future, and I didn’t know whether I would go antiquing with him in the spring. All of this was a lie; it was clear, and I was sure, and I did know. But I couldn’t bring myself to say so, because he might have gotten mad at me.
    He had dated me for nine months, though, and I suspected that he was able to see through this tergiversation to the rejection behind it; my suspicions were strengthened when he didn’t respond to my e-mail. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the unfinished sock. The way I saw it, I had three options: 1) I could finish it and send it to him; he was, after all, its intended recipient, and my having broken up with him didn’t change that. Or 2) I could finish the sock in my size, get the yarn to make another matching sock, and keep the pair for myself. Or 3) I could leave the sock unfinished, to act as a beacon to my real true love, calling him to me as surely as a siren calls a sailor to the shore. Fate would deposit him on my doorstep, he would tell me his foot size, and I would finish the sock and knit a matching one. In a modern-day Cinderella ending, he would see that the sock fit his foot like…well, like a sock, and we would live happily ever after.
    I had more or less decided on 3)—if nothing else it would allow me to stop bumping into people as I walked down the street because I was so engrossed in my knitting—when Mike sent me an e-mail with the subject heading “I want my sock!” It was an extraordinary piece of writing, full of forgiveness and warmth and wit. If I had been a character in a novel, this would have made me fall in love with him and we would have ended up getting married. Sadly, I