She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.
We thrust our babies into the air again and again, showing them what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.
We still kissed frequently, usually a cluster of small pecks. An acronym for our early deep kisses. Which in a way was more intimate because only we knew what it stood for.
We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other’s eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time, you didn’t need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did.
It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you- a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself.
And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other.
But it had another layer to it, because imitating crass people was kind of liberating – like pretending to be a child or a crazy person. It was something you could do only with someone you really trusted, someone who knew how capable and good you actually were.
Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.
I always had to resist the urge to go to him like a wife, as if we’d already been a couple for a hundred thousand lifetimes.
I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn.
People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck.
I went home early to study my apartment before the class. I wanted to look at everything through her eyes. I do this before I bring someone new into my life; I try to get a sense of who I am so that I can make it easier for them to know me.
There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued... I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet, consisten when consistency didn’t matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I were taking care of a newborn baby.
I could see it so clearly, the zygote- shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.
I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.
Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.
He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn’t know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her.
But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. She seemed to have room for me; she never turned away in the pauses that allow for turning away.
I was patience defined, patience misspelled, patience sounded out slowly, letter by letter, with the t pronounced “shh.
Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby’s soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby’s psyche. I whispered: Isn’t that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn’t that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.