The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

a search for meaning, not reason.

Every morning I wake up and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life.

The future I thought I was meticulously crafting for years has disappeared, and with it have gone my ideas about the kind of life I’d imagined I was due.

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.

Tasks that were obsolete in the city brought you together with your neighbors on the island in a kind of benign intimacy

The parallel narrative of my secret, imagined other life was always swallowing my attention, the life in which I was single, vibrant, liberated.

Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.

nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.

It was really hair-raising: your eyes are at water level so you can’t see what’s going on but the water is going faster and faster and things are getting really noisy and turbulent and you can just feel this unbelievably massive power sucking at you. And all the time I am trying to decide ‘when am I going to let this woman go and just swim for it myself?’ But as you can imagine, that’s a very difficult decision to make, and fortunately I didn’t have to make it.”