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What then? We shared a bed, shared a bathroom, shared a toothbrush sometimes. You stopped wearing perfume so often and I stopped combing my hair. And slowly (though I can’t point to exactly when) we gave up flirting down tin-can telephones and came out into the daylight of real living and took a good long look at each other and shrugged and went off into the future.
the place was full of dickhead foreigners who couldn’t function in their own country so they’d come to Eastern Europe to try at being celebrities.
As an Anglo-Saxon expat in Eastern Europe, this is disconcertingly on point.
That point, that minute, was the beginning of the good days, of still thinking of each other as fun enigmas, when everything had a wisp of mystery to it.
“How can anyone be a nebula?” “Have you given even a second to thinking about what you are, really? On a fundamental level? Everything is beyond comprehension when you get deep enough. Nebulae are the least of it. I did my time among the stars as a red giant, a white dwarf. I spent a century as an ocean just to know the land. I spent a century as the land just to know the ocean. I met my lover in the atmosphere of a gas giant.
There was a letter from your mother. I could read enough Bulgarian to get the gist. Nothing weird in there, just well-wishing and the usual charming doubts about the Englishman and why ever did you marry him, etc. I hope she gets ALS.
Holy moley.
All those nights in bed, all those hours asleep with the two of us coiled around each other like tree roots.
Whoever said similes are weak-ass metaphors should repent like a heretic.
Every argument happens at once in infinity: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom. It’s deafening. Every intimate moment spreads across spacetime like warm butter; ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million kisses all at once. The moments stack on top of each other, a great jar of pickled time: your voice, my voice, all the fucking, all the arguments, all the things we said and never said, every evening we drank away, every time we quietly wished we weren’t married, every gripe and grievance, every saving grace, it screams. The thing takes a shape in time and expands to encompass
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“That’s barbaric…” “No more barbaric than you and your infant.” “That’s not the same at all,” Argie barked. “What, creating life just out of boredom? I’d say it’s worse actually. At least the Lemurians are doing it for a reason, even if it’s sadistic. You just did it for fun. Quite a thing to create a life for, no?”
“I’m the guy who married your ex and gives her abundant sexual gratification,” I wanted to say, but stopped myself just in time.
closer and whispered into my ear, “We’re still ants, just feeling out ridges in the great cosmic garden path.” That seemed pretentious at the time. A few years later and I was the ant, looking for the ridges in your personality; some dumb insect waddling about, it felt like, doubling back on myself, pressing forward, doubling back, pressing forward - just desperately trying to find whatever it is dumb ants are after - respite, solace, and a little love - and not getting so far with any of them.
And with the booze on top of me, it suddenly seemed like human history was just one brutal onslaught of grief, and that losing a lover or a child was really part of the burden of being alive in the first place.
Somehow this was a rite of passage, a fucking awful one, but a rite nonetheless. Beside me stood God knows how many millions of other humans: Clare, Chinese peasants, Roman senators, Neanderthals, all of them reluctantly learning to practice the art of accepting the unacceptable.
They were not bad people, I realised. They just didn’t do the bullshit customary English games of excessive politeness.
Geology is built on logical principles, physics with trees on top,
Autonomy is only true autonomy when you allow others to go in directions you don’t condone. All else is just ethical masturbation.”
Is that what this is all about? Darting from thing to thing, experience to experience, like a thirsty beggar getting a sip of water here and there and still always coming away never quite fully quenched. What an awful game. Did I have my daughter for this? – to merely feel whole? Was there ever any other motivation in the history of procreation? It isn't a selfless act at all. How can one sacrifice themselves for a thing which doesn't yet exist? It's selfish. It's fucking selfish, the whole game, and I'm no better than any other monster.
“What really interests me,” Einstein said once, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” Einstein didn't believe in any kind of theistic god, probably – same as you. But let me see if I know where he was coming from.
Ahead of you the sea rolls out into eternity, where matter is combined and recombined, and all the krill of natural law muddles into itself like cream added to coffee. But from here, from your little spot on Logic Beach, you may deduce everything from first principles. This is where everything started after all.
Students were laying about on the grass, accruing debt and trying to fuck each other.
Pretty accurate.
I cannot bring myself to believe that it was all for nothing, even if everything is for nothing anyway. I cannot bring myself to believe that screwing in that field, or our marriage, or all those quiet Sunday afternoons together were just a phase matter went through, and then wandered off to be a rock or a shoe instead. You took fourteen billion years to make, and you won't happen again. Your ghost is everywhere now.
