Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

“When Olive looks back at her childhood, what will she remember? All those identical days in the classroom or the few days we played hooky together?”

That grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)

Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. The job of a writer, he’d learned over time, was not to try to tell a story in its entirety, but to tell an inevitably abbreviated version in the most interesting way one could. Giving shape and direction to something otherwise formless and elastic. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Lede and kicker.

He wonders now if marriage is about balancing on that fragile intersection between the said and the unsaid, sharing just enough to satisfy the need for intimacy without crossing over into dangerous territory. Shoving everything else under the rug, hoping it doesn’t accrue high enough to trip you up.

All that is so far in the past now, and I’d like to keep it there. So why open a door if I’m not planning on walking through it?”

All memoirs are lies, even those that tell the truth. They can’t help it, because the longer we live the more our fixed pasts keep changing.

You can be wrong if they want you to be wrong. Look. All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”