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With children, everything’s already happening and then over with. It happens while you’re trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.
There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.
But Celia’s ways of coping are already the adult ones: discipline, drinking, the search for someone else to love her.
It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving.
This is the thing: He isn’t calling about his exam. I don’t want to know this, but I do. He’s calling to be reassured about something he can’t put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don’t imagine that. Children have stages; he’ll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn’t see.