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the ecstatic logic of the binary. Of black and of white. Of being right.
this city that she has loved but which does not love her back, which does not give her what she needs to live, only to survive.
She has forgotten how this goes. How you cede your power to the man after sex. How this appears to be a fundamental universal law. How you can move from sane to crazy in a few swift moves.
Christmas looms with all its gaudy inevitability.
Many of the books have her mother’s notes in them; some from her time as a teacher, some from earlier, from her university degree. There is something moving about reading like this, alongside her mother, feeling the youthful energy in her mother’s scrawl, keeping her company while she sleeps downstairs.
As she makes her rounds, she feels how her mother loved her garden – easily, simply, without rancour or friction or pain. She feels her mother’s choices, her mother’s care, her mother’s subjectivity, like a veil hovering over this small patch of earth, merging with the night. Perhaps, she thinks, this is what remains.
‘She might leak,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘We all leak.’ These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the point of death.
Small talk is small, but the inroads to intimacy were savaged years ago. And who is to blame for that?
But long, too (although sometimes harder to name), is the list of things for which they are grateful: for small mercies, which no longer seem so small. For moments.