Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.

She doesn’t stop talking, my mother, because she’s nervous I might speak up, say the things I want to say, like, Why are you here? Please go away. She keeps talking until there’s no room to say anything.

I want to talk about my father. About how my life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, the fact that I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to turn out, that I’m bound to a rock in the sea, that I might not know how to be in love, that I might not know what love is. That my mother, and my father, and the storms, the mountains, the mainland, my own mothering—that it might have ruined everything. I want to talk about Liam. About our most-of-the-time happiness, how I’m afraid I’ll lose him someday, too, because I don’t know what it’s like to keep things.

And he just keeps loving me. For no reason except that he does. And I don’t ask, because I’m afraid to really know, and afraid it might not be real. I can never say how much I love him. Not even to myself, because I’m always waiting for him to leave.

• Is it possible to love everything at once, and sometimes love nothing, too?

At night, I wonder whether I should be angrier, whether I’m incapable of saying how I feel or, worse, whether I’m incapable of feeling how I feel.

I smoked a cigarette that Rook had stashed in my bag and decided there was nothing to do but to forgive him. There was no other way to keep him. There was no other way to love him. It just had to be full of disappointment and love.

You’ve always been preparing for this death, before you realized that he’d just be gone forever. Believing that one day, when you are annoyed that there isn’t any cream left for the coffee, you’ll get the news that it’s over.

it was so easy for me to love people who loved only themselves.

Some kind of motherly instinct had taken over, though I’d never had a mother, or been a mother, or wanted to be one. But the small army of people and the endless loop of Winter Island seemed to have performed some kind of magic trick: I could love unconditionally. Even still. After hating my father. And my mother. And Rook. And sometimes myself.