catherine-lacey

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.