Play Nice

by Rachel Harrison

But sometimes it eats at me. Wondering what memories are beyond retrieval, are totally lost. Wondering what hides in the haze.

But so often, being right means nothing but winning a round of a losing game. What an empty victory.

But I was afraid to touch her. She was too precious, and I was falling apart.

Men are never selfish. They’re smart. Women are always selfish. You want to be single? Selfish. You’re a wife and mother and do anything other than dote on your husband and children? Selfish. I want you and your sisters to learn to take that word as a compliment. Anyone who says that to you is trying to discourage you from doing what you want. That’s how you know you’re doing something right.

I don’t want to die. I just want to know how it feels to fall.

Because I want to go back. Even if it scares me. Maybe because it scares me.

You want to feel something. You feel too much. You. You hate everything you feel.

My anger is in control and I’m just a puppet on strings, a doll in a kid’s tight, gummy grip.

I hate so much about our family. I hate that I need you all.”

I love it and I hate it, and I admire it, aspire to be it, and I resent everything about it that I recognize within myself.

The words, the violence, the ugliness, the fear, the sadness, the hurt—all that will continue to make a home inside us, even if we relegate it to the attic, and it lives cramped among the cobwebs, emerging sometimes in our sleep or causing chaos in our waking lives, an invisible hand pulling the strings, a shadow at the corners of our eyes.

“Some lessons can only be taught by regret.”

Easier to call someone crazy than to confront the nuance of their circumstance, than to accept the callous cruelty that exists in the world we live in, the evil out there that revels in our suffering.