-If moods can come and go, then they were never mine.
-(High School) Those moments before life starts are the moments that ache with nostalgia. Every song elicits a false memory of lost love.
-My days were so simple that I could recognize each of my moods—loneliness, self-sufficiency, manic hope—and each experience of the mood carried with it all the previous times I’d known that mood. I had, in some sense, more history then than I do now.
-He graduated a year ahead of me and he and his closest female friend moved to Los Angeles. She gave him his haircuts, and he got one before every trip to visit me. The haircuts were horrible, though they hadn’t used to be, according to pictures. I could only surmise that she liked him, and wanted me to stop liking him. God, his hair was awful.
-Does a father look at his daughter-in-law and think, my son has half of me, so the dick she’s being fucked with is half mine?
-I want to bang my head against the window sill, like maybe I’m a bad toy that’s malfunctioning, and I can restart my software with a well-angled pound.
-In my dreams, I’m desperate to talk to him; the world rests on it. I try to find my phone, but I keep pulling calculators out of my purse. I dial in his number, and, realizing it’s a calculator, throw it against the wall. In real life, when he calls me, I don’t answer. Instead, I look at the phone and consider throwing it against the wall. Killing my guilt for not picking up.
-I was alone now in the pool—as if the light at the deep end, a car’s headlights on an empty road at night, had warned life away.
-Night, once opaque and calm: shocked into visibility.
-Playing dead, gorgeous game.
-To have a personality and a self that bear no relation to each other.
-A cousin, somewhere, went to a Catholic boarding school for high school and was too lazy to ever do her laundry. So she began growing clothes. But when she made out with a boy, the clothes sometimes had to come off, which would be a painful tearing.
Alexia & Ken
Ken was a linebacker, not as glamorous as the quarterback. Quarterbacks are dark gold poured into muscled armor. Linebackers are white flour poured into a sack. Ken suffered from his association with the quarterback. He was invited to the right parties, but didn't know how to talk right; he made a worse impression on more people than if he'd stayed at home.
He was in love with my boyfriend's sister, a sixteen year-old poet who dated thirty-year old men, skinnydipped in the ocean, and wanted to go to art school for ceramics. She had a free spirit, that he might ride out of himself.
I offered him something else: insulation, the promise that what was in him, if it found the right audience, was enough. What I offered was the cold pleasure of self-analysis, and a partner in desperation and self-loathing. I was intelligent, plotting, but also needy, and this neediness came across as an innocence that hid my manipulation. This, at least, is how I see it now. Knowing the end of the story changes how I tell it. I was probably, simply, just like him: brooding, insecure, never expecting what I hoped for. What I call calculating intelligence: shyness. And neediness: first love. It is true, though, that rather than exposing each other to something new, we both fell deeper into ourselves, and since we were so similar, thought were falling into each other.
Our first groping attempt at things sexual: he went down on me and my mother, knowing something was amiss, knocked on the door. Luckily, I was wearing a skirt, so we both jumped up and my mom came in, knowing we were flushed, but not saying anything, asking us if wanted cut fruit. She never made snacks for my friends. She asked how the English project was going, and we said we were almost finished.
We didn't talk to each other in school. We were probably of equal social status—outcasts—but thought public association with the other would lower our status. And so our schooltime courtship proceeded at a miserable, thrilling pace. We met in the planetarium's waiting room, and sat stiffly on different couches. We didn't know what to say to each other.
Or, before that—the problem of eye contact. The week we started dating, our class was putting on a series of plays, and our desks were arranged in a semicircle. By bad luck, we kept sitting across from each other. The play took place between us, and it was hard to watch without seeing him. But it seemed crucial not to make eye contact. If we made eye contact, it would overwhelm me. I know every vein my arms, shoulders, and face would freeze. My heart would try to pump blood, but it would take some time before the slush thawed. And my heart would beat loud, fierce, and futile against the icy joy of contact.
Carter and Alexia
"Please don't leave," she said.
"I really have to, I'm going." She did something she didn't expect, an animal gesture: she took him by his shoulders and gripped tight.
"Alex, let go. I'm going. That's it." He shrugged violently, both elbows jabbing air. She let go, but faster than he could move away, she grabbed his hand. He realized she was frantic, and let her hold his hand while, with the other, he got out his keys and opened the car door. He tried to climb in, but she held his hand and all her sweat didn't grease its departure. He flapped his arm, and got in the car, and then he saw: his arm had stretched. She was still holding his hand and his arm stretched four feet. "Let go, you bitch!" he screamed.
She did and started sobbing. He slammed the door and accelerated down the block before she had a chance to wipe her eyes and memorize how his head looked, driving away.
A child's frenzy. No! No! It seems the only thing that can ensure her survival is right here, and she has to grab it and not let it get away. Desperation and you can taste the saltiness of your own heart. Your throat already aches with dry loneliness. This is the thing about panic: you are two people at once. On one hand, you have already accepted the inevitable, and a small part of you is calculating, plotting, paving the way for an acceptance of tragedy, loneliness, suffering. And, on the other hand, it is easy to pretend you don't know what is inevitable, and can still convince him that it isn't inevitable; your body gets caught up in this. You plead, you weep, you scream your need. And you do this with the force of tragedy; it's already done, finished business, and you're screaming at the unfairness. But he thinks you're trying to change his mind, and he feels pity and disgust, while what he should understand is that this is a woman's profound, eternal cry against loss. This is her weeping at a public funeral.
I loved him the same way I loved myself: with clear-eyed scrutiny, and familial affection, and desperate hope. With him, there was the possibility of fantasy: I could be mysterious, special, a dark-woman archetype. Dangerous and careless, self-confident and mean. As a result, I was self-conscious, and every word was weighted to make an impression.
Only in sadness, loss, did I get close to something true. I could tell it was true because I struggled against it. We need nothing, and the sooner we realize this, the sooner we'll find peace.
Veins on their feet like roots steadying the thick trunks of their legs. The trunks emerge from the feet without ankles, and the feet splay outward, to stake out balance. Practical legs and practical feet, without any interest in beauty. My feet are slightly pigeon-toed, as are my sisters. My father likes to tell us we were genetically engineered for beauty.