Expectation
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Read between March 18 - March 21, 2021
6%
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(Rioja. Always Rioja. They know nothing about wine but they know they like Rioja.)
6%
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Outside the pubs there are people, in the manner of London markets, already clutching pints at nine o’clock.
7%
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Life is still malleable and full of potential.
17%
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They decide that there are as many different types of vaginal abject as Inuits have words for snow.
20%
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‘You must keep hold of your friendships, Lissa. The women. They’re the only thing that will save you in the end.’
23%
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In these moods everything is black. In these moods all men are damaged monsters. As is she. Everyone tells her that everyone meets online nowadays, cheering her on from the sidelines, but in these moods she knows it is just the leftovers. The leavings.
34%
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‘Stop this microwaved emotion!’
37%
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Hannah’s room is tiny – smaller than her brother James’s, even though he is younger. The injustice of this makes Hannah fulminate.
42%
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She is the sum total only of her failures.
46%
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Their naivety. Their class. And yet they are kind.
47%
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Art and life aren’t mutually exclusive. You taught me that.
51%
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Or perhaps it is she who does not know herself. She wonders if there is a word for a woman like her, perhaps a Greek word – a special sort of word for a special sort of woman, one who betrays her friend.
71%
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She is hungry for something that she cannot quite name – some elemental nourishment, something wild. She wants to taste salt water. Be scoured. Feel wind and weather on her skin.
71%
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She wakes breathing quickly, the room altered, the silhouette of the tree’s branches thrown starkly on to the wall.
71%
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Somehow, today of all days, she wants him to notice her, notice her beauty. She would not admit it to herself, but she wants to outshine Hannah, she wants to be seen.
71%
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It is, they all agree, for a couple like Hannah and Nathan, the best possible place to get married – its very utilitarian nature invests it with a sort of magic.
71%
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wants her own father to look at her like this, transfigured with pride and with love. Perhaps it is only for this that weddings are made.
71%
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for this is what marriage does – it flows out beyond the couple, engendering love, engendering life, making us believe, even for an afternoon, in a happy ending, or at least, at the very least, in the expectation that a story will continue as it should.
72%
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But she has lost much more than that, as though loss were a black hole, pulling all the potential futures, all the things you might have been, all the successes, the loves, the children, the self-respect you might have had, down into it.
76%
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It occurs to her that it begins so early, this process of letting go – of not inserting yourself between your child and the sun.
82%
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As she queues inside for salad she watches them, these young people in their summer clothes, the self-consciousness of the way they sit, as though ready to have their photos taken, with their lemon water and their flat whites, starring in the movie of their lives. The way you do, when you are twenty-four or twenty-five, and you only see yourself from the outside in.
82%
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and when they hug Lissa to their chests in their embrace, she knows that they have lived through illnesses and lived through children and lived through no children and that they are a tribe, these women, with their battered bodies and their scars.
84%
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These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the point of death.
84%
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She is like a midwife, thinks Lissa, in her gentle, certain ministrations; a midwife for death.
84%
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She imagines this is a little like it must feel after the birth of a child: this liminal space where time behaves differently, is gentled and held.
85%
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Don’t call it a coffin, darling. It’s a basket, that’s what I want, a basket filled with flowers.
86%
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It is very late, or very early. It is four o’clock. It is the time at which people are born and the time at which people die.
87%
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They are grateful for these things because they know that old age and illness are not, perhaps, so very far away, and are not kind. They have seen this already, understood this, been humbled by it. They are humbled often, these days.
87%
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called by the sun and the sky and by something else, something within that tells them they must move, right now. The same impulse, perhaps, that calls the seed to push up from the earth and reach for the light.