Catherine Lacey

Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.

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.

My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.

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 hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling__ feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing__obody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.

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.

Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.

These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs _ didn__ they know being a woman meant being at war?

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.

The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.

She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.

Maybe misery begins everywhere.

Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.

It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.