Cackle

by Rachel Harrison

It’s so easy to adjust when you’re newly in love, when you’re all gooey, soft and malleable as an infant’s skull. You make so much space in your life and in your heart, and when the person you love leaves, you’re all stretched out. There’s so much room inside me that I don’t know what to do with, space I don’t know how to fill. I’ve been waiting for it to shrivel up, for me to take my former shape, to be how I was before I met him, but it’s not happening.

Whenever I’m let down by reality, I’m simultaneously shocked and embarrassed by my lack of ability to anticipate the completely predictable outcome.

I’d forgotten the difference between choosing not to participate and being excluded.

It’s astonishing what you’ll accept when you want love. When you need it. You’ll welcome it in any form, from anyone, anything, regardless of circumstance, however peculiar. However fantastical.

I never realized how much bullshit is bound to the bottom of your hair. How it carries with it the years and experiences, all it has witnessed, has endured. The reason you can’t let go of your past is that it’s still attached. That weight on your shoulders, the strain on your back and neck. It’s your dead ends.

Am I just an oblivious idiot? Someone who will buy into anything that provides her with an ephemeral hope, a respite from her pain. Someone who will throw herself at anyone who pays her any attention. Someone so desperate for acceptance that it doesn’t matter who’s doing the accepting. Am I someone who would enjoy their time in the socialist utopia before ending up dead with a Kool-Aid mustache?

wonder how much of a woman’s life is spent this way. Enduring. Waiting for enjoyment or, fuck it, death.

He fears me because he is small. I will not meet him there. I will not shrink myself down to his size, or anyone else’s, for their comfort. For their appeasement.

It’s best not to be specific with wishes. Otherwise, you end up getting what you think you want instead of what you really need. How dangerous.