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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.
The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.
Like most people, he lied best by omission, and what he didn’t want you to know there was no point asking about.
Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry, which I took to be gospel for longer than I care to admit. Maybe the only thing worse than being a Republican was being a scab.
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.
Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order.
(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.)
