Pew

by Catherine Lacey

What a freedom that was and what a burden that was—to not have a home to go home to, and to not have a home to go home to.

Life is suffering—it really is.

The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.

It just wasn’t meant to be. You didn’t do no harm, Tams. But I did! You didn’t. Indirectly, I did. Well, I don’t know about— It’s just as bad—indirectly. Just as bad. Maybe even worse.

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?

And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that.

Everybody really blames everybody and never blames themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about things. Like how if you look at a word for long enough or if you say the same word over and over, it starts to sound crazy, or it starts to not even sound like a word or not even look like a word.

I felt so sure then—of course I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then—and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?