My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.
Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.
I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.
Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?
I used to loathe ambivalence now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.
The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.
They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.
Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.
I love you as the mother of my child”: the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.
He announces that lately he keeps losing things. “Like your wife and child,” I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.
How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?” I ask.”Keep going,” Christian says. “Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.
God is great and God is good,” Lisa says. “But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?
Take me now, God!” I shout to the inky sky. “I´m ready.””You´re not ready. You´re not even divorced yet,” Bunny says. “You cannot die married to that man.
How can I grieve what is still in motion?” I ask her. “Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding,” I say. “It´s Normandy out there.
How could you do that to me?” I repeat. I don´t have to itemize. He knows what I speak of.Eventually N produces three answers, in this
I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil.
The Betty Lady explains love and splitting up: “It´s like playing the shell game with Jesus. You can´t figure anything out; it´s best not to try. You´ll just humiliate yourself.
I review what I know once again, confronting the monolith now alien and almost unconnected to me: my marriage.
I know my vision is impaired and cannot be trusted with even the simplest tasks, much less dating. Not that I´ve come within talon distance of a man.
I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.
It had all seemed as inevitable as sunset. Instead it was the beauty of the sun glinting upon the scythe.
For me, it´s sloth,” I say. “Hedonistic sloth and escapism.
Already things are changing; it´s starting with small shit but oh it´s starting, the change, the irrevocable, impossible change.
Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.
A heart can stop beating for a while, one can still live.
I know one thing about men,” Bunny says with finality, leaving the room to check on A. “They never die when you want them to.
He left a bit too easily and with obvious relief. His feet were swift and sure on the muddy path.
I am going insane. Yes. That is what´s happening. Good. Insane.
Bushwhacked, I examine my hands. Same hands. Rings still there but no longer valid.
I have a new mantra, which I chant softly to myself: “Oh My God Oh My God.
I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.
I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.
I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.
The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.
My mind floats like ash. I blame myself most cruelly.
I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.
This people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.
Irrationally, I think, Will You Marry Me? Four words. I Want a Divorce. Four words. I would like time to count the letters as well, but there is not time.
The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.
This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.
They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.
The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.
Conversely, I though humiliation would be everything, but it´s such a nothing.
It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.
When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.
I said that additionally, since I was planning to nurse, it be best if you were off the breast before I came back to work. My boss just looked at me dreamily and said, ‘That won’t be for sixty years, at least.