Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.

“Anyway, I give this marriage a year. I mean, who gets married at twenty-two? Like coal miners. Like farmers. Not us.

They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.

Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.

She struck him as an artist who’d never found her medium, restlessly testing this and that but unable to find a way to articulate her urgency.

People could look away from him these days. For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance. Gone, the easy words.

Up there rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand that they were ecstatic.

Nothing like dying dreams, he thought, and disappointment.

He listened to his wife’s breath even into snores and wondered how he had arrived here. Drunk, lonely, stewing in his failure. Triumph had been assured. Somehow, he’d frittered his potential away. A sin. Thirty and still a nothing. Kills you slowly, failure.

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

Enough decades and a body slowly twists into one great cramp.