Pew

by Catherine Lacey

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting. I don’t want it to be so—but every year, just before it begins, I start to feel this way. And then what? I forget about it.