The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

They were victims, like the rest of us, of the way their brains worked: trying to compartmentalize every fragment of information into a pattern.

was one of those moments when you look at the person you have loved for a long time and everything is wrong with them. There is absolutely nothing right. You cannot believe you were ever captivated by them in the first place.

The self that needed to be shaken up, because the ache of living in a body was so fucking dull?

It was a need based on his absence of need. So I pushed for more togetherness. But once I was with him, the closeness was never what I wanted it to be.

Feelings were a luxury of the young, or someone much stronger than me—someone more at ease with being human.

I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer.

The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They

But I was afraid to ask women for it, afraid they would die on me or reject me in some other way. So I looked for it in men who could not give it.

But if you were ever actually satisfied it wouldn’t be satisfaction. You would just get hungry for something else. The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.

Maybe this is why people had friends: so we could see ourselves and our own insanity in them.

When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story.

To want what you had—now, that was an art,

a gift maybe.

Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting.

I wondered if real love always devolved into this: moments of non-sexiness.

We turn them into who we want them to be. We fill in their bodies and words for them.

think the place for you to start, the question that you might want to ask yourself, isn’t so much what is love,” she said. “But is it really love I’m looking for?”

Now I was totally estranged and out of my body, as though I had no idea how to move. I saw my feet walking, felt my heart pumping, but I didn’t know how I was breathing on my own—how my lungs knew to breathe and my heart knew to beat.

Who even knew what was killing me more: the pain itself or the fight against the pain?