The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.

I started keeping a diary in the third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, I named it and personified it and made it my confidante.

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

As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony.

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 didn’t like childhood, and I was afraid that I’d have a child who didn’t, either. I was

I would not kick the door off its hinges. I would not choose the muffling comforts of home. I would be the explorer, not the mummy.

I don’t remember my mother telling me to stick a half a lemon inside the cavity of a chicken before you roast it, but I know that’s what you do.

But I walked home, swooning in the summer night. I didn’t want an encounter. I wanted a partner.

Then: There’s something of value in trying to put the world into words.

It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it’s true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It’s more like, Oh, right.

You have always known this. The only thing that’s mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious.

Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed.

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.

At the falls, she has the urge to make herself “part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism,” by casting herself into the avalanche of water. “I started to edge even closer, when the thought came to me If you had a companion you would stay where you are.” This revelation destabilizes her. “Where was my companion? I had no companion, et cetera. I had no life companion, but why was that?”

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.