Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

At night, I watch him sleep, trying to see into his soul. I lift his fringe and kiss his forehead in case it’s there.

All we need to know is that beauty is truth, said Keats, and I’m sorry to sound callous, but what he actually needed to know was the cure for his general malaise and for the illness that eventually killed him, aged twenty-five.

Back then, I carried my feminist framework everywhere, pressing it onto situations, movies, books, conversations, everything. It always fit perfectly, but I grew tired of carrying it and threw it in my backpack.

Beauty might be truth but I was not a Grecian urn; I was a woman and I wanted to feel pretty.

Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it’s knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.

That my brother ran away—I told Robert he wasn’t funny! And I was needy about Robert so Finnegan left, and it all comes back to me—the starting point is me. I don’t take steps to stop bad things, I never say no, you cannot, to the boys, to the men, to Samuel, to the one-night stand, to Robert, to Finnegan, to my little boy. Why didn’t I say, no, you can’t run away, you can’t leave me, you can’t bring home the sticks, you can’t have this cheap watch, I never say no when I should be saying no, but I refused to laugh at Robert’s joke and that started everything.

You and Nicole will find yourselves sharing stories of former boyfriends, former sexual experiences, and together sorting through the strangeness of how we blame ourselves when we could have set stronger borders, when you whispered no but you could have shouted it, how you begin to see yourself as a person without substance: the world not within your control. How this shades into every crisis, every loss, how you look for the place where you could have shouted no, and made it stop, you make everything your fault.