The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.

I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.

“Has my watch stopped?” she wrote. “No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.”

When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.

Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.