Cursed Bread

Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.

You can witness the unthinkable, you can have the unthinkable done to you, and at some indeterminate point in the future you can still be happy, even if just for a fixed moment, a little ball of satisfaction in the chest—isn’t that incredible? Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste of it.

I've been looked at in pity and in fear and I've learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive.

The trick is forgetting for one moment and then forgetting for another moment and then look, the moments run together like a string of beads, and there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.

The world is only ever one breach away from being unpeeled entirely, one tragedy, one glimpse behind the curtain.

... there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.

You never asked me what it was like to spend my life listening as other people spoke. You never asked what it was like to hold those words inside me, to decide what to share, what to insinuate, but mainly what to keep for myself, these glowing and sordid little secrets that sustained me.

Nobody, at the beginning, believes they will debase themselves for love. Nobody believes in anything else but joy.

...I think that all those small and meaningless secrets gave me pleasure because they distracted from the larger terror of it all. They reduced it to something manageable and understandable; easier the mouthful of blood than the world in flames.

I wondered sometimes if I would ever have a normal appetite again, or if the knowledge of hunger, and how flimsy the things that kept us from hunger were, would always be there underneath.

I felt that if I could only get to beauty, something speechless and formless would be absolved in me--if I could only get beyond my own hands lathered in soap, chapped from flour and coins, hands which did not touch or receive touch, hands sewing by a circle of lamplight. ...Of course I know now that beauty is relative. Now I can pine for the swallows nesting in the roof of the lavoir, the dry dirt and grass under my feet, the river's winding path. Even a newly mopped flagstone, butter melting on potatoes, a mended white cloth to shake out over a table and set with things gleaming sharp and bright.

I thought to myself how the worst I had done really was not any of the little betrayals but in murdering my marriage with familiarity, and it was unfair because that is only what marriage demands, the careful establishing of familiarity in order to be able to live your life the next day and the next and the next.

Who else will remember? Who else will make it good, make it beautiful, make sense of it all? There were never any marks left. What took place between the two of you, what took place between the three of us, left no proof. Maybe just a scratch where the bed frame moved against the floor, a smudge of dirt where it scraped the wallpaper, an earring rolled under the dresser, dents in the table where the tip of a knife sunk in. I have to remember and recount, even if you are the only one who will listen now.

I don't want a book, I don't want the trouble of it, he said. I don't want to get involved, I just want to watch what's going on. I know what's going to happen and then it happens, and I can go outside and feel good about it, I can leave it in the room. A book hangs around, but an image is just a moment.