Catherine Lacey

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.

And who is to say that loving a person isn__ just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?

Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, 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.

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.

I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.

All your problems and all the answers to those problems exist in the boundaries of your body.

Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood__ne person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that_

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift.

Isn__ everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you__e in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love_ and to love someone is to know that one day you__l have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria_ and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame_ and your wildebeest, everyone__ wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can__ bear the tension of walking around the world as if we__e always going to be walking around the world, because we__e not, because here comes a cancer, an illness a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.

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.

I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.

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 was thinking about stabbing myself in the face__ot actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.

He believed that all forms of government were spiritually bankrupt, that the only true way to follow Jesus was to be radically self-reliant _ off every grid. The energy grid was wasteful and corrupt, and the food grid devalued and destroyed the planet, and the culture at large was full of pain and deceit, and money itself was truly evil, and even the church (or, as he would say, the corporation that calls itself the church) was the most corrupt _ contaminated by money and political greed and widespread land ownership. Worst of all, they called themselves holy.

Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.