The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

So then, sometimes I wonder whether that means I look sad too. Maybe I do. Maybe sometimes I am. Not consciously though, and there’s a difference.

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

There’s a certain brand of crazy that’s reserved special for the American South, and people who aren’t from there just won’t get it.

Mortality is unbearably confronting, so much so that lots of people spend their whole lives trying to live as though it doesn’t chain them like it does the rest of us.

Death is confronting for sheltered people because it fractures realities.

It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

You turn up for your family where we’re from. But turning up is a two-way street.

Every smile is laced with heartache; every blink is edged with loneliness.