Catherine Lacey

None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone.

I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it__hat she'd be better off not living__nd how was I supposed to live after that?

I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.

...no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

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.

It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.

It's disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie, but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake.

The feeling doesn__ always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn _ they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.

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?

But we always avoided talking about these things__ifficult things__nd I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.

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.

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.

I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn't get many of them because I didn't make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren't edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.

Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.

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.

Adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for wanting to have it all the time.