Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

The story of how a couple meets, who kisses whom first, who declares their love first, is as instrumental to a couple’s mythology as a creation myth is to a society’s ideology. The ownership of those memories is wrested back and forth between the parties (the bickering and talking over and cutting in that couples resort to when recounting their beginnings) until one of the parties dies.

Plato describes the physical transformations a soul experiences after being pierced by Eros’s arrow: “The shoulder blades which up until now have been rigid, melt open, and small wings begin to swell and grow from the root upwards. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, the gums are all aching and tingling—that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings.” But when your beloved fails to phone you after three weeks, the soul feels like a child whose budding teeth have been knocked out.

A story stops when the writer doesn’t know what to say next; it ends when there is nothing more to be said.