The Only Girl in Town

May is the word you use when you're asking permission, she said. You have never waited to ask permission.

Is there a way to go on? Instead of staying in this place alone?

I don't know who I am without sadness anymore. It lives in my heart, my stomach, my limbs, my head, every vein threading through me. And a kind of limbic system of guilt runs along with it. For the mistakes I made, for being the kind of person other people could leave behind and discard. If you take away the sadness and guilt, I don't know what I am anymore.

You have layers over layers of a memory in a place. There is the deepest layer, with the ones you love the most, or have the most memories with. Years and years and years. Maybe, you think, I'll make new memories here with new people. Because you can't give up the place entirely-it's physically impossible, or emotionally. And there you are, and both you and the place are layered, like wallpaper on top of wallpaper for centuries, and you'd have to peel everything away, you'd have to be the bare boards, no memories, nothing left. To get rid of some things, you'd have to get rid of everything. So then you are. There you are. Living on. A house with ghosts.

We have to have this, my heart said. But we will not survive it, my head said. Both right. I am scared of impermanence, of change and loss. But this-this me alone, nothing changing, no one left to lose-this is unbearable.

Was there ever any other choice? Moving on, moving on. Everyone is moving on. Except me. I'm stuck here.

But they also had this energy about them. They were young and interesting and full of potential, and you hated them and wanted to be them at the same time. At least, I did.

They say things and look, sometimes when they mean to and sometimes when they don't, men who think of themselves as red-blooded and all-american and good-guy. They go so fast from I would never to So what if I did? They do it and then they tell themselves that they didn't, or that if they did, it's fine.

I think we're a part of nature... We're born, and we live, and then we die. And our bodies return to the earth. Things grow from it again. So we're always part of the universe.

The odds against all the ancestors over all the years meeting up and having the children they did, and the odds against the exact cells coming together to make you...

Wrap up in a blanket and lie on the floor and tell yourself, “I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t have to be anyone. I am just a person in a blanket on the floor.