She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.
I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching – windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?
Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?
Oh, the future. I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.
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.
I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.
I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it.
I wouldn’t use a British accent out loud, but I’d be using one in my head and it would carry over.
He loved me. He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. This complicated flame of being was mine.
A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.
That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased.
The usual treatment is psychotherapy.” “I know.” I didn’t explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping.
I decided, right there in the darkness of the hallway, that I wanted this.
There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders. It takes so little.
That said, the spaces between my features are in perfect proportion to each other. So far no one has noticed this. Also my ears: darling little shells. I wear my hair tucked behind them and try to enter crowded rooms ear-first, walking sideways.
We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don’t.
People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It’s like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.
People love to make life harder than it has to be.
It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it.
They were sparkling with the old love, the greatest love of my lifetime. And they were triumphant.