Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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.

The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again. Too hard to explain to her sister that she does know how to listen, that she’s too old or too spent to be angry all the time.

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

Attempting to recall when it was that people realized the emergency was already upon them, the warning signs noted, then duly forgotten in favor of squabbling about small things, about taxes and football championships and protests that caused offense or caused traffic, of doggedly plowing a course.

She is prone to treasuring her most trivial items, ticket stubs from the ferry, old water bills, books she didn’t really like. This is never so much in the belief that they’ll one day come in handy as that the act of throwing them out will somehow trigger their long-withheld purpose, a sudden and obvious use revealing itself only as she watches the item fall from her hands.

It is an accepted belief that things fall apart. The question of whether the falling apart is necessary is separate and usually secondary.

It is easy to think about these things, recollections of things passing fast from your grip, and decide they are simply too much to acknowledge. Easy to imagine inevitability when in fact there might once have been any number of options. It was always going to turn out this way, spoken like a charm against pain, against memory. Sweat and sun feel like virtue, like expiation, so now damp and rain feel like failure, like an opportunity for some great act of heroism missed. Better, all things considered, to turn away from the fact of before until the thought fades again, the way a headache can suddenly cease, and all that exists is the now. The great washout of the world and no sense that it might have been otherwise.

She can’t explain it, except to say that the thought of looking like someone seems only a prelude to the thought of acting like them. How long, if you really resemble a person, can you stop yourself from falling in step with them? How long until it turns out you are where they were hiding all along?