Nothing to See Here

by Kevin Wilson

I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.

I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me.

I called them Mint Julep Boys, like they missed the Old South because, even if there was horrible racism, it was worth it if it meant that they could be important by default.”

I didn’t like men all that much, found them tiring.

My mom looked at me with this strange expression, and now, thinking back, I feel like this was the exact moment when she realized that I wasn’t her, that I was a mystery to her and maybe always would be.

It made me think that wealth, as of course I already knew without firsthand experience, could normalize just about anything.

He was short, too, but there was an intensity about him that made up for it, the way he accepted his ugliness, which was a kind of virtue.

The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.

My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.”

If there were a button that would end the world, and that button were right in front of me, I would have smashed it so hard at that moment. I often thought about a button like that, and when I did, I always knew that I’d push it.

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.

They looked sad. Defeated. Like they had hoped for something different and now felt embarrassed for having thought it might happen.

It was true happiness I felt, that I felt for Bessie, because I knew what it felt like to make that shot, to get what you asked for, and how rare that was in life.

A wicked child was the most beautiful thing in the world.

I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it.

And I wanted to burst into flames, too. I thought, How wonderful would it be to have everyone stand at a respectful distance?

“There is no point in making children eat what they don’t want. A fool’s errand.”

Jasper, like most men I’d ever known, did not like to be gently corrected in public.

If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.

And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.

It looked like what love must look like, just barely there, so easy to extinguish.

How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them? I wanted to know. I wanted to know so bad.

They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.

And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren’t alone.

know you don’t believe it, but I have a conscience. I feel bad about stuff. It may take longer than it does a normal person, but I do feel bad.”

There are a lot of nice things about being rich, but one of the best is that you can say almost anything, and if you do it with confidence, without blinking, people put a lot of effort into believing you.”

“Who do you know who’s done a good job? Name one parent that you think made it through without fucking their kid up in some specific way.”

Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn’t my life anymore. It was someone else’s.

That's how I felt after my first child was born.