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.

decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.

real editor isn’t just someone you work with; he’s your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he’s really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.

It occurred to me that she was the one who had told me I could be the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses. My mother had never once been surprised when I accomplished something. She had never believed me when I told her I would fail, even when she took me to the airport with my hulking backpack when I was twenty-two and afraid of Phnom Penh, afraid of Katmandu, and, of course, so was she. She didn’t say, “You’re right, it’s too dangerous—let’s go home.” She said, “Get on the plane. You’ll be fine.”

Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work. Logically, I knew that the person I’d lost was not fully formed, that he was the possibility of a person. But without him I was gutted.

Nature is wasteful, he had said. That’s why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

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.