The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

the whole history of women and suffering, the generations of practice at grief.

Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.

and how he doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands.

The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.

She is warm with a furious hope, the elation available only to the very young.

every ordinary moment holds a potential calamity, and you cannot know when one will rise.

his mouth wide open, sharp teeth to the air. You have to really listen to hear that little cry.

easy with a faith in the goodness of things.

there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain—awake or asleep.

Here I am with my wife, thinks Ben, as he washes the lettuce at the sink, here we are with our daughter, Grace—there is a delight in just saying her name. What pleasure there is in some statements of fact, such simplicity, such calm.

They’ve been advised to talk to her as much as possible, but they did not need to be told. It is an immediate urge: to tell her everything they know.

Sara feels a swell of something else, too: that she has seen all this coming in advance, has been expecting it for years, not this disaster exactly, but some inevitable loss, some sudden coming apart, as if all those nights she lay awake worrying were all of them rehearsal for this.

It scares him, sometimes, to remember that he did not want to have a child, as if time can sometimes run backward toward a reckoning, in which whatever is will be revoked and replaced with whatever might otherwise have been.

it doesn’t need to be said, how efficiently an infant proves the relentlessness of time.

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.

These words—they are the exact right thing. Some kinds of trees require the blast of a forest fire to break open their seeds.

A surfacing of an old rebelliousness, as familiar as the warmth of Henry’s hand in his.

The surprise is how easy it is.

There is a kindness in not telling. There is love in covering

out. They are quick to turn out the lights but slow to put away their phones, leaving only the odd glow of their faces, lit white by the screens, as they wait on their backs for sleep.

There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.

In the mind, time dilates, and time contracts. Different days travel at different rates.

On another part of that same floor, in Philosophy, one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could also accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past—the whole system simply too complex for the human mind to model.

Think of William James, one floor down, back in Philosophy, who once compared any attempt to study human consciousness to turning on a lamp in order to better examine the dark.

She sees wisdom in the sight of him, his growing body announcing it every day: life goes on.

Some of the children dreamed exquisitely beautiful worlds, the shadows of which will appear in their drawings for years.

The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next.

His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail.

There will be days of spectacular

beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel...

And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.