Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.
I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.
Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity?
The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.
Will I ever stop being surprised by the ways people make hell?
I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.
These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs – didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?
Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.
He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.
I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love.
I couldn’t decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.
Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.
Adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for wanting to have it all the time.
That’s the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.
But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?
It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn’t in love, wasn’t in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.
She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.
But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we’d be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.
It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.
And he’d said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.
Lately, I couldn’t remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I’d only seen the previews to.
I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.
I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?
None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.
That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.
He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.
I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.
Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.
I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.
I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.
I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he’d like to become part of a story, any story.
All your problems and all the answers to those problems exist in the boundaries of your body.
I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.
Though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn’t have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.
Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.
It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.
Days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have.
She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.