Play Nice

by Rachel Harrison

But the easiest way to tell who a man really is, is to injure his ego and see how he reacts.

“My mom died.” Seconds pass. A siren sounds somewhere in the distance. Someone else’s misfortune temporarily louder than mine.

When you inherit mostly complexes, why not appreciate the rare gifts?

No stains from my mother. Only scars.

But now that our mother is dead, I wonder…how? How can she be to blame? She’s not here. She hasn’t been here. Our family scapegoat is gone. Whose fault will everything be now?

I wonder what right Daphne has, what right anyone has, to say what is and isn’t love. I wonder if love can be ugly. If it can do the wrong thing. Bad things. I wonder if it can ever really die.

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

Men are all the same, Mom once told us, but it’s the ones who try the hardest to convince you that they’re good that you really have to watch out for.

Dad and Amy were cool about Daphne, but I always suspected they would take my not being totally straight as proof that Alexandra turned us into man-haters. Which she tried. But I love men. I just don’t trust or respect them.

Motherhood irrevocably changed me. Years in, and I was still getting to know this new self, the ways my daughters had reconfigured me from the inside out. But motherhood had also irrevocably changed how others saw me, how they spoke to me, and it was consistently unmooring.

The world will drive a woman insane, then point at them and laugh.

I am inside my body, inside this moment. In the present. The past is over, and the future is overrated. Now is my favorite.

Alcohol was never my problem. It was a response to my problems.

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.

Maybe there are no truths in memory. Maybe, when we look back, we see only what we want to see, what suits us in the present.

It just makes me wonder about belief and delusion. What’s the difference there, really? Maybe delusion is an eagerness to believe. A desperation for it.

Sometimes silence isn’t peace; it’s war.

So much of my life I’ve felt like I’m pressing my nose to the window, watching everyone else be happy beyond the glass.

‘Our demons get us all in the end.’

Our mother’s presence is everywhere, her influence. Her ghost is us.

Everything that exists, exists in need. In want. We operate with our own motives. Some more selfish than others.

I feel…I feel like it’s attached to me, too. Like it wants something from me. My attention. My time. My energy. And I’m giving in. And the more I do, the more it wants.”

“What do you want, Clio? I don’t think it’s the truth. I think it’s a version of the truth you can live with. A version of it you can sell yourself. You’re curious, you’re open, but up until the point it’s ugly.

Maybe good intentions don’t actually fucking matter. Only the action. Or the perception of the action.

The longer I put it off, the less I want anything to do with it, with my life.

Watching the damage unfold feels startlingly familiar. It feels like home.

The wound is open. It’s always been open, festering. It doesn’t matter if I keep this panel shut. If I climb down this ladder, walk out of this house, and never come back. Whatever’s here will always be here, even if no one else acknowledges it but me.

You’re not okay.” “No, I’m not. And I’m not allowed to not be okay. I have to be okay. I have to be pretty and fun and together and nice to look at and good to be around. But I’m not any of those things anymore. Because I have this problem. Because I’m having some trouble. And no one believes me—they just think it is me.”

Days turned to weeks turned to months, and I crawled toward healing, wanting more than anything just a moment of peace, a moment to forget all the pain and terror of the past. I was no longer there physically, but mentally, it would not let me leave. It would not let me go. The demon found me in my dreams. My nightmares. It leached the colors from my world, from my view. I understood then that there was no escape.

It lives in this place amid the damage and the chaos it reaps just by existing, and it breaks my heart because it’s so familiar to me.

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.

My scars are my vindication. We shouldn’t need them to prove anything, but that’s the world we live in.

Remembering is not always a light shone into darkness. Sometimes it’s a claw reaching out and dragging you back.

I know now that my heart is a soft thing. What’s the point in pretending it isn’t?

“Some lessons can only be taught by regret.”

That brief public exposure of my vulnerability—of my pain, my confusion, my fear, my grief—will forever overshadow everything I do.

I’m just not sure he understands. How could he? How could anyone? Our demons are ours and ours alone. My mother’s demons were hers. Even if she were still here, I couldn’t ever really understand what it was like for her, why she did the things she did.

I know now that she wasn’t crazy. I’m not sure anyone is. I think it’s just easier to call someone crazy than it is to admit that they could be right. 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.

They say ignorance is bliss, and, yeah, maybe, but it’s still...