The Grip of It

The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger.

What role were we playing? The ghosts or the haunted?

When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.

In movies, everyone is always surprised the door is unlocked.

There are times when saying nothing means nothing, and then there are times when nothing holds an answer.

There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.

I say, "This is the only way it might be," thinking of all the other ways. I'm either telling a lie or there are so many truths.

Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that.

I feel incapable of facing the worry I’ve caused her. My mind insists that her recent transgressions have been more severe than my own.

What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what's ahead?

I take a deep breath, and I swear I can fill blood pick up oxygen and carry it through me, delivering questions that blink rapidly behind my eyes like closed captions.

Connie sits on the toilet, and I think about whether she noticed how much the bathwater rose when I sat down in it. It's something I'd worried about since I was a teenager, the serenity of a bath marred by my anxiety about my own volume. She is so thin, so elegantly formed. I feel certain she knows the water she'd displace wouldn't be more than an inch or two.

I tell myself not to discredit my husband's ability to predict the odds. That I'm trusting my own instinct, not his. I tell myself we can win, even if he agrees with me.

One can only identify something known; the unknown goes unseen.

Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy

We run out of things to tell each other. We share second- and even third-tier stories we’d never bother other people with. Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.