Expectation

by Anna Hope

‘Well, first of all, let me say that I think the pressure for women to have a perfect home is one of the greatest heists of capitalism.

There is no future to fear, no past to regret, only this, only a series of moments, strung along, like lit globes on a string – there is warmth, there is food, there is comfort.

She watches the children look at the stones and their parents, more often than not hurrying back to them, grasping them by the wrist and hauling them to their feet. If she had a child, she thinks, she would not rush and pull, she would get down on the earth, she would get down beside them and look at the stones.

She may not ever know. And this fact – the knowledge of his subjectivity, these experiences of his to which she will never have access – feels more violent, somehow, than the betrayal itself.

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.

And how she wants him here, in this moment, wants nothing more than for her own father to hold her like this – 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.

She wanted something wild, something that exists only unto itself – nature without audience. Must everything be made human-size? She does not want the domestic. The domestic is what she came here to escape.

‘But I had to live my life. All my life. Otherwise I would have been no mother at all.’