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?

Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.

Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?

They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.