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Summon your witnesses. —AESCHYLUS
the disgust of a person who was not committed to any consideration of scale when it came to emotional display.
they would make fun of the sleeping people in the park. Not the homeless people, or the strung-out ones. Just the ones who’d made their way over to the park in their sweatpants, laid out their blankets, and pretended that the world was a safe place that only wanted you to be well rested. Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park
Toby hadn’t dreamed of great and transcendent things for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn’t an idiot. He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness.
(There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.)
And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.
Was this how dating always was? Were there always this many stories? He didn’t remember the telling of stories, but maybe that was because back when he was young, nobody had stories yet; everything interesting was happening right then, not in the past.
He headed home because there was nowhere else to go.
He returned home to his dorm that night the way a soldier returns home from war: proud and a little haunted.
He never would be comforted by the adage “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle” after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself?
What do you do when you run into a ghost
She felt so bad for anyone who remained allegiant to a life they’d built just because they’d built it.
You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity
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He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.
Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.
