More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No therapist ever told me I should forget my childhood, because I hated therapists and had never seen one.
“Fair enough,” he said. That and “No worries” he used to hide a multitude of sins. I forgive you. You are forgiven. Don’t let it happen again.
I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.
The internet was a colander. You were the water. The metaphor changed by the week. It didn’t always make sense.
But after, at least, I feel a lot better. Always do, before it gets worse again.
Mulled wine and stockings over the fireplace. Crisp smell of the six-foot fir that had been cut down so it could be adorned with plastic and glass baubles that polluted the house. As the tree died in celebration, there in our family room.
But the frown became over time a kind of cynical wince. The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him. A sourness that creeps in when you have no more hope of being successful.
After a workout in a gym so small my ferocious intensity to wreck every machine drove out the one flabby, middle-aged man using the rower. The hunger and the fear in his eyes as he drank me in repulsed me and yet perversely made me push myself harder.
They had a dead ostrich chick taxidermied, along with a lion cub. Every animal in there was a dead baby of some kind, even the owner behind the counter.
We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.
He’d drop the subject. I’d drop the subject. We would click back into place on the tracks, like it had never happened, a space I could inhabit like an actor. If I wanted to. Because we had a reservoir of love and goodwill? Because we, like most, were creatures of habit?
I didn’t have to keep pulling out my insides for him. Explaining any new thing might pull all the stitches out, without warning.
That was it. The sum of my connections. I had acquaintances, colleagues, people I performed rituals of friendship with … but they weren’t friends. Not close friends.
“We’ve got two small children,” she said, like she had to convince me to take the case. Or like that would help me solve the case. Two small children had never solved a case. The two small children would almost certainly like to be left the fuck out of this.
I usually stopped talking to people when I felt the compulsion to say “I’ve got a giant salamander in my room no one’s ever seen before.”
“Who do you work for?” “At this point, I think I’m doing the lord’s work. Don’t you feel you’re doing the lord’s work?” “Rebel angels,” I said. “No one gets to decide who god is anymore. I think we both know that by now.”
Imagine you brace your will against that door opening. And when it’s all different. When it’s different, it’s like the weight you were fighting against dissolves into mist and you fall because there’s nothing left to lean against. And you wonder about all the other things that prop you up.
I don’t even hate you. I just don’t fucking care about you anymore.”
I told myself that sometimes powerful forces pass through your life that speak to you but, in the end, keep their own counsel. That they wash over you like an extreme weather event, then are gone. No analysis can fill in the rest.
