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.

Its home until Nora gets home from Berlin. Good riddance to that cat. It had always hated him, even though he was the one who fed it most of the time.

The cat referred above as being under the table?

Under the table, Nora’s cat settles on Hilda’s toes.

Is it there or not?

and her cat jumps onto her lap.

Is it a clue? The cat is here and there and also not there? Wtf

They hadn’t known how lovely it had been to be bored, inconvenienced, irritated, sleep deprived. How lovely it had been to be alive and able to ignore death.

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.

This is how she felt at the doctor’s office, too, the day they got the news about Marlen’s cancer, right before the doctor opened his mouth. It was like she already knew what he was going to say, even the words she’d never heard before. Is it a trauma thing, to become a bit psychic?

But the best superpower was the one available to you.

It feels like a riddle. When do you do something if now is too soon but there is no later?

Maybe it means a continuation in another place or another state, but that feels absurd, too, frightening.

Why doesn’t the thought of not having existed before bother him as much as the thought of not existing after? It’s the same exact thing!

She’s not sure if it counts as a date for a man to invite you to his panic attack and then tack ice cream onto the end of it, but she tells herself it does.

She’s been much more inclined to think that, in light of the end of all things, nothing matters, period. But maybe it’s nicer to think that everything matters the same amount.

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.

“Grounded in reality,” she says. “It is like saying you are rooted in water.”

If he could choose what to believe, he would believe the world isn’t ending. But you just don’t get to choose.

That and you shouldn’t fall in love right as the world is ending. Only an idiot would do that.

How unfair that time only goes one way, that by the time you understand how much you will miss something, it’s only because you’re already missing it.

“You think things like this are going to change you into someone else, but generally they make you more of who you already are. That’s true of lots of things. Tragedies. Weddings. Ends of civilizations.”

There’s a sense of dulled panic, like a loud sound that has been going on for so long that you stop paying much attention to it.

Maybe, all this time, Alfie was a hugger and no one knew it.

Maybe the entire concept of “beliefs” is just something too complicated to be understood by human beings.

The twinkling stars seem to be moving closer, like the universe itself is drawing in. The northern lights are out, too, electric-green sheets of it.

Memory is imperfect, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug.

Kids don’t realize how hard it is to be the adult, how courage doesn’t just show up, how life is actually more frightening when you’re older because the stakes get higher and higher. You love more and more people and also understand more fully how fragile and temporary they are.