We often imagine that somewhere in the world there is a person made just for us, the exact piece that completes the puzzle, as though human beings functioned like animals that mate according to a perfect fit between male and female, one to one, with no room for error or doubt. But that is not entirely true: for those of us who speak, this perfect fit does not exist in quite the same way. Language itself empties out the place of the other and turns it, in part, into an open sp