Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

D’you ever have the thought, says a voice along the corridor, that it might be getting worse every day but you’re just so used to it that you aren’t noticing?

It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention – exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling’s approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know.

It is easy to forget matters like this; easy, amidst the monotony of supermarket sandwiches and damp subsistence, to forget the chippings and scrapings that come attendant on a world fundamentally narrowed in scope.

How, she wondered, is one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence is familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

I don’t think it’s possible to hate someone you don’t also fundamentally love.

The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviours. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.