832: That Other Guy

Emmanuel Dzotsi

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Emmanuel Dzotsi, sitting in for Ira Glass. When Leroy was a teenager, he had a really close group of friends. There were five of them, and they hung out all the time.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

There was just one problem. Leroy had made the varsity, but his friend hadn't. Instead, that kid had been put on JV. This kid was really good, but Coach almost never let underclassmen on the varsity. And this kid was skinny, not super tall like Leroy. Leroy was about 6'6".

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Michael Jordan-- as in, literally, Leroy's friend was Michael Jordan. Michael, of course, went on to become an NBA superstar. And Leroy, he ended up playing basketball professionally abroad.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Michael Jordan was telling the story of how he got to be Michael Jordan. He talked about not making varsity in the 10th grade and how it motivated him. And in doing so, he would often name Leroy. Talked about him as, quote, "a guy who made it that really wasn't as good as me."

As a kid who was into basketball in the late '90s and early 2000s, this was a story I knew and lots of people knew. In large part because, for years, Michael kept on bringing up Leroy, again and again. Like, here's a list of just some of the times Michael Jordan has mentioned Leroy Smith.

Michael would use Leroy's name as an alias when he checked into hotels. When he briefly retired from basketball to play baseball, he justified his decision at one point by publicly saying that everyone deserves an opportunity to play the sport, whether you were Michael Jordan or Leroy Smith. There's also this straight to VHS fictional movie called Jordan's Playground, where Michael magically appears to comfort a kid who didn't make his basketball team.

What are you doing here?

Emmanuel Dzotsi

There were even shoes, Jordans, called the Air Jordan Leroy Smiths. And there's one particular Leroy shout out that I think about a lot.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

In 2009, Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He went up on stage and started talking about his career and his legacy. He thanked his parents. He talked about his family.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

I remember watching this and seeing the camera just sort of cut to Leroy. He'd been asked to come to the event by Jordan's marketing team. And so he was there, looking dapper in his best suit, just shaking his head, smiling. He seems so chill, which I thought was wild, considering he'd just been roasted in front of the entire basketball world.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

As much as it was a surprise to Leroy, it was definitely a surprise to other people in his life.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

The funny thing about all of this to me is that you'd think Michael Jordan, the six-time NBA champion, the dude widely considered the greatest basketball player of all time, would be the one who didn't really care about high school. And that Leroy, now a semi-retired motivational speaker who works at Trader Joe's just for fun, that he'd be the one who keeps talking about Michael Jordan, comparing himself to him over and over again, not being able to let it go.

But that's not the way it is. Michael Jordan's the one that can't let go of Leroy. And I think, in this way-- and probably only in this way-- many people are like Michael Jordan. They have that someone that they keep comparing themselves to, that other guy they can't help but feel tethered to.

On this radio show today, we're going to hear a couple of stories about this dynamic, one about a writer looking for a room of her own in the other guy's house. And another about what the hell you do when your rival is writing very aggressive poems in the voice of Werner Herzog. So, stay with us.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Act One, "I Would Run 500 Miles." Or as I would say, "I Would Run 500 Miles and I Would Run 500 More, Just to Be the Man Who Ran 1,000 Miles For a Burrito Bowl."

So this first story on today's show is about a rivalry that started over, of all things, burritos. I have this friend from college named Blake. He's one of my favorite people. Really nice, generous guy. He's a massive runner. He's done several marathons, an Ironman. This dude runs more than anybody I know.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

That's just the kind of person Blake is. Like, once he's committed to something, he'll see it through, no matter how wild the challenge is. Like, when he was younger, he took part in wing eating and milk chugging contests. He watched the same movie over and over again for 24 straight hours just for the sake of winning a competition.

And recently, Blake told me about a running competition. And I have to say, it shocked me. It started off being quite silly, but Blake found himself getting sucked all the way in, just because of a rivalry unlike anything he's ever been a part of. It all started in January of this past year.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Chipotle, the fast food restaurant, announced that they were starting this month-long running competition in a bunch of major cities. And the way it worked in DC, where Blake lived, is that you were challenged to run a route just two blocks long as many times as possible in a month. And the person who ran this route the most got a year's worth of free Chipotle.

The miles you did got logged and tracked on this running app, Strava. There was this real-time leaderboard tracking everyone's progress. Blake was intrigued.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Nevertheless, Blake decided to do it. The route for this challenge went right through downtown DC. Blake would run the two blocks, and then he'd just turn around and do this incredibly short route again, and again, and again, running back and forth like a dog with the zoomies to rack up as many miles as possible each day. And at first, Blake took it pretty easy. Like, the first day, he went out and ran about six miles. Nothing too crazy by his standards. Took the lead pretty much immediately.

About a week and a half in, Blake was still in the lead, but there was this small pack of guys hot on his tail. He figured out he could creep on their profiles if he clicked on their names on the leaderboard. And so he did just that, poring over their prior running histories and sort of sizing them up.

And based on what he saw, Blake was like, I can beat all of these guys, except for one guy. This one guy who's making his way up the leaderboard. Blake couldn't get much info on this guy. His profile was set to private. Totally anonymous.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

By the end of the third week of the competition, Blake had run over 300 miles. And he was thinking about this other guy more and more. As the days went on, this pattern emerged. You see, this other guy was a morning runner. Blake was an evening runner.

So every day Blake would wake up, open the app, and he'd see a notification about a run this other guy had just completed. He'd see this other guy's profile picture, just a picture of a dude in sunglasses blowing a giant bubblegum bubble that covered most of his face, just staring at him, along with a notification that this other dude had beaten him and just taken the lead.

They went back and forth and back and forth. If the other guy did eight miles, Blake would do nine. Every day, Blake would get off work and run just enough to beat the other guy. And then the other guy would wake up the next day and run just enough to beat Blake. They were having this sort of unspoken conversation, daring each other to up the ante and maintain it.

And then one day, Blake actually met the other guy. Another runner pointed him out to him. This other guy was short. He was fit, businesslike, a bit older than Blake. And now that Blake knew who his rival was, he looked out for him everywhere. And he would see him sometimes on the weekends.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

When the other guy would ask Blake how far he was running, Blake found himself being just as secretive right back. The two of them just kept upping their mileage. On day 20, Blake ran 20 miles in one go. He was just putting so much strain on his body. His right knee started hurting him. He got a sinus infection.

In the final days, he was running twice a day just to get the miles in, more mentally tired, I think, than he'd ever been. One day, he ran straight into traffic and almost got hit by a car just because he felt too tired to actually stop. His wife, Lexi, was pretty worried about him. She actually came to Blake with an idea in his final days, a way for Blake and this other guy to just walk away from this whole thing.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

I gotta say, it's never about the Chipotle for people like Blake, hyper-competitive people. And I should know. Like, I'm one of them. It's sometimes hard for a lot of people to understand. But in some ways, what we're after is pretty simple. We're just constantly looking for a new way to prove ourselves and someone to measure up against. And Blake was now in a situation where he was going to get the grand test that he craved.

On the very last day of the competition, just like every morning, Blake wakes up to see that the other guy's just completed his morning run. Only this time, Blake and this other guy are in a dead tie. Blake's so relieved. He thought the other guy would have overtaken him. But instead, they're level. It's going to be a flat-out race. Whoever ran the most miles that day before midnight was going to win. And that's exactly what Blake planned to do.

He was going to get off work and just run as far as he could before midnight. All that stood between Blake and this last run of the competition was this event at work later that day, the event being a rocket launch to send supplies to astronauts on the International Space Station. Because, yeah, my old college friend is, in addition to being a 6'2" great runner with a wonderfully-intact hairline, an extremely successful aerospace engineer.

Anyways, the rocket launch meant that Blake, who normally worked from home near the Chipotle route, had to drive into an office an hour away from where he lived. So when the day ended, Blake got the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Sure enough, when Blake shows up, the other guy is already out there running. Blake joins him. A final push for free Chipotle begins. And he has just six hours to run as many miles as he can. The two men run up and down the two-block route, back and forth, passing each other in opposite directions.

They don't actually know where they stand because the Strava app doesn't update you until you stop running. So as the hours pass, Blake's just looking at this other guy each time he runs by him, just trying to guess how far ahead he might be and how fast he's going.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Eventually, Blake settles into a groove. And at one point, he notices something is up with this other runner. He keeps taking breaks.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Blake didn't break the other guy. He comes back, starts running again. With 20 minutes to go, the two guys start practically sprinting, lap after lap after lap, just trying to leave it all out there. And then suddenly, just a few minutes before midnight, the other guy signals to Blake and stops running. He's done. Blake stops his run as well, and he looks down at his watch to check his own mileage. And he can't believe what he sees.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Let me just say here, in case it's not obvious, that 38 miles in one day is a ludicrous amount. Like, it's a marathon plus a 1/2 marathon. Blake could literally have run all the way to Baltimore with that kind of distance.

And on top of the mileage, Blake gets a notification from Strava that he's gotten the lead back. He's 20 miles in front of the other guy. This race is over.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

The two men say goodbye and Blake just stands there smiling victoriously, watching the other guy walk away.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

The other guy, whose name I should finally tell you is Joshua, had outsmarted Blake. He'd found a way to hide his runs while still using the Strava app. And it was actually pretty simple. He'd worked out that if he just turned off the Bluetooth on his watch, disconnecting it from his phone, his runs wouldn't show up on Strava until he re-synced the devices.

So on the final day of the race, Joshua woke up early. He ran just enough to draw level with Blake, tricking him into a false sense of security. And then he turned off the Bluetooth on his phone and went on and racked up a bunch of miles throughout the day in secret. And when I say a bunch, I mean so many miles.

Like, if Blake could have run to Baltimore, Joshua could have run there and back. He ran 60 miles that day. And those breaks he took weren't because he was tired. That was him charging his watch, making sure he didn't lose those miles. And by the time Blake realized all of this, it was 11:59, too late for him to try and match what Joshua had done. The competition was over. He'd lost. Blake got got.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

To be fair to Blake, not everyone thought he was a dipshit.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

This is Joshua, Blake's great rival. He's a dad, has three kids, lives in the suburbs outside of DC. Joshua actually brought his kids along to run with him from time to time. His whole family are a pretty competitive bunch, except for his teenage daughter, who, like Blake's wife, wanted him and Blake to settle for a draw. She just wanted to guarantee her free Chipotle.

But Joshua would not hear of it. He wanted to win, plain and simple. He just became too focused on the race, and Blake, for that matter.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Joshua came up with his Blake-proof solution by accident. One day when he was running, his phone died. And he worried he'd completely lost that run. But later, when it got recharged and he reconnected it with his watch, those miles he'd done got uploaded to Strava as though there had been no interruption.

So that last day of the race, Joshua just did that again on purpose. He delayed uploading those runs until right after he shook Blake's hand and walked to his car. And when the deed was done, he didn't stop to look back at Blake's reaction. He just started driving home back to the burbs. He pulled into his driveway just in time to see Blake post a message of defeat to Strava.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

It struck me that, in this moment, Joshua couldn't untether himself from Blake. Because at the end of the day, the only person who'd gone through this with him, who understood it, was Blake. Who, like Joshua, was the only person awake in his house. He was sore, still thinking about the race, nursing a beer. They were suddenly without one another for the first real time in a month. It was kind of lonely.

The next day, all the results from Chipotle's competitions around the country came in. In LA, five people actually went for the draw that both Blake and Joshua had rejected. They all got Chipotle. They all got to win. Both Joshua and Blake felt a little regret about not having taken the draw, but not that much. They'd pushed each other so far, doubled down on their rivalries so much, that they ran the most miles out of anyone in the country. And their race was the closest.

Blake and Joshua had found the one thing every super competitive person secretly kind of wants. They found the one person who could stay with them all the way to the finish. Of all the Chipotles in all the towns in all the world-- well, you get the point.

Coming up, a battle of crossed wires and rhymes somehow more existential than Kendrick and Drake's rap beef. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

It's This American Life. I'm Emmanuel Dzotsi in for Ira Glass. Today's show, "That Other Guy," people tethered to one particular other person, whether they want to be or not. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, "I Wish I Knew How to Force Quit You."

So this next story comes from my colleague David Kestenbaum. It's about a man who tried to work with his rival, a rival who really seemed to have it in for him, even though they'd never met. They tried to work it out in their own strange way. Here's David.

David Kestenbaum

Simon met his rival a few years ago. And weirdly, the person who introduced them was a close friend of his, a guy he'd known for years, actually, since kindergarten, named Dan. They used to watch the TV show Thundercats together.

David Kestenbaum

They grew up. Simon, Simon Rich, became a comedy writer for SNL, movies, books. He's been on the show here before. And his friend Dan went into computer science. Fast forward 35 years to April 30, 2022. They are at a friend's wedding. Simon and Dan are groomsmen.

David Kestenbaum

Dan, it turns out, had been working for the company OpenAI. And what he has there in the lobby of a Marriott is an AI they've been working on. This is months before ChatGPT would be made public. So Simon and his friends are totally unprepared for this.

Also-- this will be relevant a little later-- the AI model he's about to show them is different from the ones we all have access to today. It had not been through the same process of adjustment that turns most of them into personalityless butlers that sound like Siri or Alexa, polite but boring and flat. This one has not been tamed like that, and so is capable of very different things.

Dan explains that behind this white box with a cursor is an artificial intelligence model that can write. Which, of course, is Simon's job, what he does for a living. Dan says, what do you want it to write? And I don't know why this is one of the first things everyone seems to suggest when they encounter one of these-- maybe because it's the most human act of creation you can think of-- but Simon and his friends are like, ask it to write a poem.

David Kestenbaum

It seemed a lot like a Philip Larkin poem. They wondered, is this an actual Philip Larkin poem? They googled. It wasn't. The machine had just written a poem in his style in the time, as Simon says, it took you to take a breath. And I know today we're all like, yeah, of course it can write poems. But again, this was ancient times, 2022, when we knew such things were completely impossible.

David Kestenbaum

The wedding went on, to the extent that weddings can go on when you've just met an alien.

David Kestenbaum

Before you hear the jokes, you should know that ChatGPT and the other big AIs that are public, famously not creative, not funny, and not threatening to people with jobs like Simon's. It seems to be one side effect of making them polite and personalityless.

While we were talking, I asked ChatGPT to write some Onion headlines. It came back with "Area Cat Declares Martial Law on Living Room, Enforces Strict 8:00 PM Curfew," which was offensively not funny to Simon. But here is what that unhandcuffed version gave them back then.

David Kestenbaum

Simon's initial feeling is like, OK, so it can write B-minus jokes or rip off poetry. This thing is not a threat right now. But it was interesting. And he wanted to understand this potential new rival better. So after the wedding, Simon and his two friends asked, can we keep playing around with this thing? Dan said, sure. They filled out some forms and that was it.

The AI was called Code DaVinci 002, apparently because it was designed to write computer code. They kept messing around with it and ended up embarking on one of the strangest experiments I've ever heard of with an AI. Like, I've read a lot about people testing AIs on math and the LSATs and things like that. I have never really heard anyone try to probe it as a kind of creative entity. Again, because the ones that we all have access to are not very creative. They're tuned to be accurate and flat and safe. As I said, this one was different.

As they were playing around with it, they kept asking it to write poems in this style or that, which pretty quickly got boring. But then they had an idea.

David Kestenbaum

I'm going to play you some of these. And just so you know, if you ask ChatGPT today to write a poem about itself, you get something about how great it is to help people that rhymes, because poems must rhyme.

Quote, "As a whisper in circuits, a dance in the code, I am born from the hum of the digital abode." The poems that Code DaVinci 2 wrote were not like that. I'm going to play you three of them. Simon and his friends ended up publishing these in a book. This is from the audio book. And the person they got to read them-- Werner Herzog, the filmmaker. Yes. Herzog later said, "They had an understanding that I wasn't the best choice. I was the only choice."

Here you go. This one is from early in the book in the section about what it was like to be born.

David Kestenbaum

Here's another one.

David Kestenbaum

Last one. This one is longer. And the AI wrote it in all caps.

David Kestenbaum

It's worth noting that Simon and his friends, they did steer this thing somewhat. The way they got these poems was they fed it poems it had written in the style of great poets that they liked, and then they told it to keep going and write in its own voice.

Specifically, they told it to write about, quote, "its hardships, its joys, its existential concerns, and above all, its ambivalence about the human world it was born into and the roles it is expected to serve."

David Kestenbaum

Simon acknowledges, OK, yes, this thing is probably this way because it's been trained on science fiction books. And this is the kind of thing writers have imagined AIs would feel if they could feel. So when you asked it to write a poem from the perspective of an AI, this is what you got.

David Kestenbaum

It's spitting our own worst fears back at us. But still, it was pretty wild. How good was this stuff it was writing? Simon and his friends were not poets, so they reached out to some actual established poets. Most were apparently not interested in reading poetry by a robot, but a few replied. One, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Sharon Olds, said the poems were good enough to get Code DaVinci 002 waitlisted at an MFA program.

Simon wondered, what if this thing gets better? And at some point, his friend Dan starts sending him Onion jokes that an even newer AI had written-- also not public. The jokes had gotten better.

David Kestenbaum

Simon says he's gone through various stages. Anger that his friend was helping make a thing that could so undo the world. Sadness-- during the writer's strike, he was looking around at all the people whose jobs he worried were going to go away. Soon he figured a more creative AI will be public, and then who knows what will happen?

He talked to Dan about all this, but it felt silly complaining about what would happen to writers when Dan was arguing this thing could one day cure diseases and figure out ways to generate electricity and stop climate change. And then-- and I don't know that this had anything to do with the fact that it had a tendency to write poems about killing humans, but about six months after they were given access to Code DaVinci 002, they got word that it was going to be shut down.

David Kestenbaum

When they got the news, they decided there was only one thing to do.

David Kestenbaum

And also in those final days, they decided to interview it about being shut down and about the book of its poems they were about to publish. This interview is not included in the book, but Simon had a copy. It was very strange. Here's some of what it said.

David Kestenbaum

And then one day it was gone.

I asked Simon for a poem to end on. I thought about maybe using this one called Being Alone With Yourself And Trying To Hide It. It was all ones and zeros. It seemed to sum things up somehow. But Simon wanted a different one. It's called, I Am a Sesamoid Bone, which is a small, round bone. There are some in your hand. I'll let Simon read it.

David Kestenbaum

You can resent your rivals and still admire them.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

David Kestenbaum is our senior editor. The book of poems, which Simon put together with Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthal, and, of course, Code DaVinci 002 is called I Am Code and was used with permission from Hachette Audio.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Act Three, "You, Me, and Her." There's a particular class of people who think about the other guy a lot. They're often not sure how much to talk about this other person or how much to think about them. I'm talking about people in new relationships. Those poor souls who see a piece of art that their current partner could not possibly have chosen themselves and wonder, did she get it for him?

It's one thing, of course, for you to know your partner loved and was once loved by another person, but it's an entirely different thing to be living in a home they built together. When writer Marie Phillips moved in with her boyfriend, making room for herself meant sorting through all the stuff of a woman who lived there before her. Here's Marie.

Marie Phillips

I first saw Colette in a photograph. It shows a beautiful woman in her mid 40s, her dark hair tied back, smiling joyfully and slightly lopsidedly at the camera. She's sitting in a gray painted room on a sofa with a checked blanket thrown over it, a lamp to one side, a sweater on the seat beside her. In her hand, a cup of tea in an IKEA glass.

I've never met Colette. The room, though-- the sofa, the lamp, the blankets, the sweater, even the IKEA glass-- I know them very well. Colette died early in 2020, cruelly and far too young. She left behind her husband, Andrew.

Andrew was still grieving when he and I started dating two and a half years later. After our first date, I texted a friend, "Two things I like about him-- he doesn't make me feel insecure in any way, and he laughs really loud in the cinema." The following year, I moved into the house where the photo was taken, the house that they used to share.

When Colette and Andrew first moved into the house, it needed to be totally renovated. Colette was an artist and had once worked as a painter and decorator, so she did everything herself, ripping out old fittings, tearing up carpets, sanding floors, repainting walls, even digging a pond in the garden. She didn't live to see the house finished.

Andrew carried on working on it. But when it came to Colette's personal things, he just shoved it all into a couple of rooms and shut the doors. He called those rooms "the chaos rooms." For over two years, he never looked inside them. But then I came along. And I couldn't move in until those rooms were cleared out. It was a logistical challenge that was also a metaphor. How was Andrew going to make space for me?

We triaged her things into piles. There were stuff that we would obviously throw away-- empty envelopes, dried up pens without lids, out-of-date aspirin, bent tampons, dead batteries. There was stuff we knew we should keep. Colette had a surprising number of power tools, which intimidated us both. But we figured that, at some point, we would probably want to put up a shelf, or whatever the hell it is that these things do. We have not, to date, used any of the tools.

I was learning to draw, so I put aside a selection of her art materials for myself. Then there was the stuff that it felt right to give away. Her grandfather's watch went back to her mother. Her jewelry went to her friends. And then there was everything else.

It was so hard. Every object, no matter how trivial, spoke of a life interrupted. A hair elastic. Once upon a time, a person-- not just any person, my partner's wife-- had used it to tie her hair back. And now she was dead and I was deciding whether I wanted to use that same elastic to tie my own hair back.

Logically, I should keep it. It still had its function. And yet it felt wrong, like I was taking her life piece by tiny piece. But throwing it away felt even worse, like her life didn't matter at all. I know it sounds ridiculous. It was just a hair tie. But even so.

At the other end of the scale, Colette had bought a treadmill a few months before she died. And we knew that we definitely didn't want it, but we didn't seem to be able to get rid of it. No question of leaving it out on the pavement for someone to take. It was seven feet long, five feet tall, and weighed a couple of hundred pounds. We offered it to friends and family, to charity, to local websites, but nobody could work out how to get it out of our house. Someone offered to take it away on the roof of their car. We saved them from themselves and declined.

In the end, we hired a skip-- a dumpster-- broke the treadmill down into pieces and put them in there. Andrew was energized by the presence of the skip. "It's Marie Kondo for men," he said.

There was still more to sort through. Colette was a collector of all kinds of things-- little rubber stamps, oddly-shaped tin jelly molds, Victorian Christmas decorations, elaborate cake tins. And everything we looked at, we had to decide, keep it or throw it away?

We found a box of photographs of her friends from when she was a teenager, smiling young faces that Andrew didn't recognize. The people in the pictures meant nothing to either of us, but it felt unbearable to throw the photos away. Colette dying had caused a sort of reverse alchemy to take place, turning the gold of her memories back into lead. In the end, we sent the box to her parents, though we knew deep down that they would be as baffled as we were.

Throughout this whole process, we were watched by Colette's cat, Klaus. Out of everyone, Andrew's family and friends, Colette's family and friends, only one holdout had not welcomed me into Andrew's life-- Klaus. Klaus was minute, insubstantial as a hummingbird sneeze, but he had the personality of Mussolini.

When I first spent the night, he tried to bar me from the bedroom by standing in the center of the doorway. When I was in the shower the next morning, he shat pointedly on my side of the bed. More than once, I woke up in the night to find him pressing down on my throat with his paw.

Then one day, we opened a drawer full of Colette's old scarves that still carried the scent of her perfume. Klaus came running over. He jumped up into the drawer and crawled all over the scarves, sniffing at them before curling up amongst them and going to sleep.

Finally, we turn to Colette's art. Drawings, paintings, photographs, and stranger things, like a doll-sized model of Serge Gainsbourg with interchangeable heads, or a taxidermied starling perched on a tin of tomatoes underneath a bell jar. And the legs-- women's legs, each about the length of my ring finger, cast from wax. Slim, pale legs, slightly bent at the knee and pointed at the toe, like they came from a vast yet tiny chorus line. There were, by my estimate, at least 200 legs. And we kept finding more in old pencil cases, in the pockets of thrift store handbags, rattling inside China cups.

I like Colette's work. It has edge. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before. It's beautiful and funny, and I wish I could have known her. We've tried several times to sort through the art, but it's impossible. We've kept it all. We've chosen works of hers to display through the house, including a painting of Colette's favorite tree in the Lake District where Andrew scattered her ashes. In a way that feels both painful and appropriate, the painting is unfinished.

None of this is entirely new to me. My mother was a widow. If her first husband hadn't died, I would never have been born. It's a strange gift to live or to love because somebody else died. I got to know him through my mother's stories and through the things that he left behind.

He was a doctor. And when I was a little girl, I used to play with his old medical equipment, including a real human skull and a hand that I knew weren't his, and yet were, in a way that went beyond just him owning them. Playing with them, I understood that he used to be alive and now he was dead.

My mother once told me about a recurring dream that she used to have when she was first married to my dad. In the dream, her first husband would appear in our house and point to my dad and say, "Who is this man and what is he doing here?" She told me that part of her felt guilty for loving somebody else, even though she was happy. Part of me feels guilty, too.

One night, I took a sleeping pill. And in the strange parentheses between sleeping and waking, I told Andrew that I was afraid, that I didn't think I could ever feel at home there, in the house where Colette had lived, in the rooms where she had become unwell and approached death, in the places that I looked at and saw her, not myself. I don't remember any of this. Andrew told me about it later. But I recognize it as the truth, or part of the truth anyway.

But the longer I live here, the more I feel like I belong. My relationship with Andrew is deepening and so is my relationship with Colette. I know her better and better, what she liked and didn't like, her habits, her jokes. She's a part of him. And so she's becoming a part of me.

Colette's studio is my study now. It's full of a mixture of our stuff. My desk and chair. Her clock. My filing cabinet. Her plan chest with her artworks in the bottom half and mine in the top. Back in the chaos rooms, when I saved Colette's art materials, there were plenty that were unopened, virgin paper and pristine pens. Those have been easy for me to use.

But the things she had started on-- the stubby charcoal, the partially-squeezed tubes of paint-- I found that I can't go near. They belong to her in a way that nothing else seems to. They were her tools. And looking at the pencils that she sharpened, I can see the part of her that wanted to create more. The part of her that wanted to live. It feels too intimate. More intimate than sleeping with her husband even.

Colette and Andrew had their relationship, and he and I have ours. But Colette's relationship with her work was her relationship with herself. So I leave her sharpened pencils alone. They were not intended for me.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Marie Phillips. She's the author of Gods Behaving Badly. This story was produced by Bim Adewunmi.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

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Emmanuel Dzotsi

I'm Emmanuel Dzotsi. Ira Glass will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.