The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

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.

All humans, whether they know it or not, are profoundly impacted by their imminent deaths. 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.

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

like the safety net of being able to drive away if I need to. And I suspect I will need to.

I play the loudest songs in the National’s catalogue the whole drive there, so my brain never has the chance to lull into silence and feel the full nervousness I refuse to acknowledge.

It’s strange how you can long for a place to be your own and hate it so much in one breath.

you can know someone’s lying and still not know the truth…

It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful. That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.

The content isn’t unfamiliar when you read it; it’s like you’ve read it before. Sam feels like I’ve read him before, but I haven’t.

Georgia—I think maybe the more important question is, who didn’t ask you?”

acknowledging the fullness of something then requires you to feel the consequences of it with a fullness too, and I don’t think he has the bandwidth.

Then he pauses and glances down at me, each of us still frozen in our dance stances, and I hope the universes freezes and I’m forever stuck in the arms of the world’s hottest alcoholic, dancing on the grave of a bigot.

“Today isn’t the day you’ll get her to see the world the same way you do.

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

walk up the stairs and Sam’s behind me. He moves quietly but stays close, and I get the distinct feeling that maybe he is the adult version of a nightlight. At least, that’s what he’s becoming to me.

You can’t avoid the avalanche of emotions that come with the termination of a relationship; you can only prolong them, which I refused to do. I looked every feeling I felt square in the eye and stared it down until it rolled over. The grief would come in waves, and I’d miss him on certain days, at certain hours, but for the most part, I had closure, because it wasn’t rejection and no one fucked up. We were in love and it didn’t work.

“It’s gonna feel for a minute like I went and broke your heart and fucked you up, but I swear to God, Gige—it’s the other way around. You’re going to fall in love in a few months with someone who’s not like me at all, and I’m going to fucking loathe you for it.” He chuckles. “But I need you to…to let me go, because I probably can’t let go of you. I love you more than I meant to.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?” “Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.

Am I validated or devastated?”

“This’ll kill me!”

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

“You can shut your goddamn mouth, Maryanne.”