Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

On a Tuesday in May, in her thirty-fifth year, Rachel shot her husband dead. He stumbled backward with an odd look of confirmation on his face, as if some part of him had always known she’d do it.

“A man is the stories he tells about himself, and most of those stories are lies. Never look too closely. If you uncover his lies, it’ll humiliate you both. Best to just live with the bullshit.”

I don’t even believe in happiness—not as an ideal or as an authentic state of being; it’s a child’s goal—and

She felt like an emotional beggar, going from door to door her whole life, asking perfect strangers to feed her. Fill her. Fill her again.

A person could be photographed every day of his life, she suspected, and still hide the truth of himself—the essence—from all who came along in pursuit of it.

“The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.