Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

But there is no happy medium in a marriage when one party wants to be alone and the other doesn’t. There is no way to have it both ways; someone always loses, and tonight,

“You’re constantly worrying about things that aren’t your business, but they’re never the things you actually want your mom to worry about; it’s always—like, things we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. You assert yourself then, when we don’t need you; and then when we actually need you you’re too busy worrying about the stupid other stuff to be there for us.”

It was, she supposed, easier to have compassion for someone else’s mom than it was to have it for your own.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

Julia had not taken much with her from her early life, but she had learned, by example, that it was easier to get mad at someone than to tell them you were scared.

She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else.

Her mother had many infuriating traits, but this was arguably the most infuriating one, and indeed the most hurtful, her ability to dismiss Julia with a handful of words, to reduce her to nonexistence simply because she felt like it.

you could only count on people to stick around for so long when you didn’t give them much to work with, and she simply didn’t have much to give; she felt like she’d been deprived of some critical lessons in socialization right out of the gate, and trying to make friends, when you’d skipped those lessons, was like learning a new language relying solely on a handful of reticent subjects, in this case subjects who’d already decided you were never going to be fluent.

She has always vacillated between feeling things too deeply and not feeling them at all,

It’s easy to grow complacent, to allow yourself to dwell in the dull dramas of the everyday and lose sight of your own unimperviousness.

She will remember those few moments so often that after a while she’ll begin to doubt that they ever happened at all.