Marilou Is Everywhere

I couldn’t remember why I had ever been afraid to walk in the woods at night. It was all creatures, and I was a creature. Everything was legal between me and the rest.

These were people where the middle part of them had been rotted and eaten by something that never saw the daylight. Whatever was in them stayed hidden and got muscles. And once it had muscles, it did all the talking. I saw it. Hello, myself, I said.

Like most evil, I supposed, mine was only a hurt hiding in whatever materials were near. My hurt had no imagination for other people.

I don't intend to waste my life on me either. Not on my mother, not on Clinton, not on myself, not on the flames of old hurt. I do not care to stand in the doorway of myself, making a list of punishments. I'm the kind who can only see the road ahead so far. I'm the kind that has to get empty somehow. I tried all the other ways. The only one that wouldn't kill me was taking care of friends and wildlife. I'm no martyr, I promise. No savior, no hero, no saint--I eat too many figs to qualify, I'm afraid. Neither do I think some tally will be balanced. I'm not sure I can be forgiven in full.

There is a part of you that will always live outside your body, in the stars.

...and wasn’t love a series of things you did in spite of how wild they were? Love is crazy, and this was crazy, so it must be love. It must.

I'm the kind who can only see the road ahead so far. I'm the kind that has to get empty somehow. I tried all the other ways. The only one that wouldn't kill me was taking care of friends and wildlife.

At home, I found it helped me, this habit of dwelling only in the things I could see. I could crawl from one moment to the blank vista of the next...Moment, moment, moment. I shaved off one moment and left it behind.

I felt good. I usually had a window of optimism after I bathed, which wore off by the time I was dry again. But for just then, I was washed. I was hungry in a clean right way I hadn't found in some time.