The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.

I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.

have nothing comforting to say to my brother beyond the trifling “we don’t need them” shit I’ve thrown him too many times before, which is both true and irrelevant all at once. We don’t need them. But we would like them.

think he thinks knowing more just means more pain. It’s a fair assumption, though likely incorrect, because pain begets pain, shame begets shaming, and not being tolerated begets intolerance.