Play Nice

by Rachel Harrison

For the crazy girls. This one is for us.

Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.” —Jade Sharma, Problems

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

I’d rather you girls open your legs before you ever open your hearts, she said once, half a bottle deep.

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.

“But I believed my sister. I believed in her belief. I never held it against her. Some people believe in God, a bearded man who lives in the sky. We don’t call them crazy, do we?”

All the world’s an ashtray.

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.

Men love when you’re callous.

Laughing. Throaty, hideous, soul-chilling laughter. Evil. Someone, something, laughing at me as I cried.

One person’s truth is another’s fiction.

Normally, I wouldn’t care. I’ve historically kept a pretty laissez-faire attitude about cheating. Monogamy is for suckers.

But I’ve never been any good at controlling my impulses. It’s not in my nature. Apparently, it’s genetic.

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.

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.

This silence isn’t calm; it’s waiting. There’s something coiling inside it, I know. I can feel it. I believe it. If I were to close my eyes, I would see it. Sometimes silence isn’t peace; it’s war.

“I can leave anytime I want. I don’t live here. If you want to play with me, you have to play nice.”

You’re ruining your beautiful life. It’s ruined. It’s been ruined. You ruined it. You want to feel something. You feel too much. You. You hate everything you feel. You need to feel something different. Something louder. You should light yourself on fire.

That foul voice at my back. It will feel like nothing. The flame meets my skin, my scar, my old burn. And I feel nothing. But the smell.

Crazy is quicksand.

I can’t do anything but apologize. Play nice.

I can’t help myself. Watching the damage unfold feels startlingly familiar. It feels like home.

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

“So strange that sometimes you don’t know how you feel about someone until they’re gone.

“Some lessons can only be taught by regret.”

I accept that it exists. That there’s a being out there that wants my attention, my energy, my best, my worst. My joy. My pain. That’s taken from me and would continue to take should I allow it, should I continue to dance with it, and if I were to say anything about it, no one would listen.

I inhale the scent of coffee and tobacco and a new day. That magic morning smell.

But forgiveness is a different beast.

But I have no regrets, because 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.