Bye, Baby

by Carola Lovering

Sometimes it feels like my duty as a woman to fuck with the opposite sex, just a little.

“Sorry to rush out. I get worried about Grant, leaving him alone with her.” I want to challenge this—I want to make her clarify which thing she’s concerned about: Is it getting to bed on time, or is it Grant? I want to remind her that Grant is Ella’s father, that he can deal with his kid for one goddamn hour—but I can’t. I have zero authority on the subject.

There’s an old stubborn loyalty I cannot fight, a love that lingers in my soul, that’s woven into the fabric of my systemic rhythms. Like knowing how to swallow, how to cry, how to breathe. How do you forget something like that? How do you push a love like that out of your physical body?

That’s just how friendships become in your thirties, I think as I head south. The love is still there, but the urgency for that constant companionship fades, replaced by something else—romantic partnerships, yes, but maybe we also just get tired.

That’s the problem with trauma. You can decide to change how you think about it, time can fade it, but it’s never going to disappear.

And isn’t that a requisite of loving someone—to grow complacent to their most fatal flaw? To suppress the urge to change them until it all but disappears? The practice resembles acceptance, but the process is more painful. It’s more like sacrifice.