I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

Nora doesn’t know that starting over like this is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for the young. She doesn’t know that metaphorical fumigation is often the only option when you’re, say, forty, and you have a job and a mortgage and responsibilities and friends and New Everything is just a lot of work, a lot of money you don’t have. She doesn’t think about it because she doesn’t have to; she simply does what young people do, what young people are uniquely able to do: in the face of her first real broken heart, she gets on an airplane and finds New Everything.

(Is there anything more humiliating than one-sided romance?)

You don’t make jokes about widows’ dead husbands, even when you’re the dead husband. It’s cruel.

It feels like forever ago that he and Nora were little and loud, constantly underfoot and always asking questions. Hilda misses that. Then again, she misses everything that happened prior to now. 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.

Over the years he constructed the book in his head—or, rather, it constructed itself, and he observed it. Characters sprang into being, a plot began to unfold; it was like watching a bed of flowers grow from seed. Someday, he always thought to himself, he was going to write that book, and he was going to get it published and hold it in his hands. Other people were going to read it. But, like most people with a lifelong aspiration, all he ever did was daydream about it. Writing a book in theory is easier than writing a book in actuality, especially when you have a job, a wife, a kid, other hobbies, friends . . .

The feeling of divine urgency led him to publish with a small local subsidy press, instead of trying to figure out how to get someone else to do it (he’d entertained this possibility for all of three minutes before realizing that the traditional publishing process is A Whole Thing, requiring years and years of query letters and literary agents and editing and self-promotion).

When do you do something if now is too soon but there is no later?

As it turns out, the way to keep sane when the world is ending is the exact same as when it’s not.

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.