Severance

by Ling Ma

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.

The Righteous Brothers, “Unchained Melody,” possibly the most beautiful song I have ever heard, more hymnal than anything.

Now I felt myself rescinding, emptying of all personality, emotion, and preferences, so that he would know as little of me as possible.

imagined the lives of the occupants inside.

You’re fine, I said. You’re okay. Nothing bad is happening right now.

When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush.

When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

So many of the people depicted seemed freakish or other in some way; they didn’t fit in. But that didn’t matter, the photographs seemed to say. What mattered was, they styled and remade themselves in the way they wanted to be seen. They inhabited themselves fully.

Hey, he said. He was wearing his one nice shirt, a button-down plaid needled with rain. And, I couldn’t help it. My heart barked confusedly with love.

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure.

We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.

To despise someone is intimate by default.

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.