The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

(Silence can make somebody bigger, I’ve come to believe. Grief can, too. A big sad silence emanating from someone can cause you to invest that person with all manner of gravitas.)