Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel.

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.

“The rest of us, though, are getting super fucking old. Facing down the unending forward march of time. The era of obsolescence.”

“I don’t know why you always have to immediately default to negativity,” he says.

She had done everything she was supposed to do and yet her life had a hollow, flimsy quality to it.

She had not ever experienced certitude when it came to inarticulable feelings: love, for instance, or orgasms. She had known decent sex; she had known affection. But she had always been convinced that there must be a higher level of ascendancy. It was not something she gave a great deal of thought to; she avoided the pursuit thereof for the same reasons that she’d never tried hard drugs, because she didn’t want to be disappointed or get addicted.

“Moving to the suburbs is like getting a face tattoo,” she said. “You’re committing in perpetuity to a certain kind of lifestyle.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said, and she was convinced everyone would be able to tell that she felt absolutely nothing. Because of course there was some deficiency in her, this complete inability to feel joy during unequivocally joyful situations.

Maybe this was how everybody’s lives unfolded, just a series of maybe we should decisions made or not, succumbing to the silent lure of peer pressure without even realizing it.

She slept deeply and dreamed vividly; she floated through her workdays with serenity, having unearthed new reserves of patience and empathy and the ability to turn a blind eye to people she ordinarily wanted to murder.

“It is what it is,” she intoned, one of their shared hated clichés.

“Fuck me sideways,” she’d said to Mark after she first saw it, “if we ever own anything that can be even loosely described as wine art.”

What kind of life is that, if we’re both miserable all the time?”