I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

This is what marriage looks like after so many years. She can hold his hand and feel comforted by him even as she wants to shove his face into the Jell-O salad.

It feels like people are clutching her shoulders, talking all at once. She hates this about smartphones. Before smartphones, if you were safe within the four walls of your home, people had to wait their turn to talk to you, or at least put in the effort to knock on your door. And there was phone etiquette back then too. You didn’t just call people up and say, “Turn your TV on now.” You said, “Hello, Hilda, how’re you? I’m fine, thank you. What are the chances you’re watching the news . . . ?” It was calmer. Even emergencies were calmer.

It’s one thing to learn that someone you love is dying, and it’s another thing altogether to learn that everyone you love is dying, and you along with them. But, as it turns out, the silence following either revelation is about the same.

Watching someone throw up feels much more intimate than talking someone through a panic attack, though she feels, objectively, that these should be switched, or at least equal. They’re both insides-on-the-outside events.

optimism is when it could go either way and you try to believe it’s going to go the good way. Denial is when it’s going to go the bad way, for sure, and you pretend it’s going to go the good way.”

you can make progress, exponential progress, become a new thing altogether, and that progress can be completely undone and mean absolutely nothing in less time than it takes you to notice what’s happening. She’d been under the impression that once you’d grasped and understood and implemented something, that was it. But progress is just upward motion, and just because you’ve risen to an altitude of 14,000 feet, that doesn’t mean gravity has forgotten you.

She’s been turning into their mother ever since the position became available, but recent events seem to be fast-tracking the process.

She feels like she’s sitting on the edge of a cliff, dangling her feet over; that rushing feeling in her stomach had been exciting and terrifying at first, but as the weeks go by, it’s becoming a nauseating drone. People are not meant to live on the edges of cliffs.

Is that independence? Just being so constantly, acutely aware that no one’s taking care of you, no one’s noticing what’s wrong, pretending that’s fine even if it’s not?

At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.