The Almost Moon

The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density?

I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.

I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.

If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

Fucking bastards are simple by nature.

Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.

Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.

Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.

All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.

The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.

I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.

It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I

So much in life is about almosts, not quites.

There are secret rooms inside us,” I had said to my therapist. “A relatively benign construct,” he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.