The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

As I envisioned it, my husband and I would be separate people. We would be as important individually as we were together, as a couple. We’d be discrete entities with our own histories, energy, and motion, but we’d be bound to each other like stars in a constellation: a union born by the force of imagination and emotion, by the curious work of the human mind.

It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable.

I don’t know if Brandon does too much, per se. It’s not too much for him. But it was frequently too much for me.

I was not discouraged from rocking the boat, but I also was not inclined to rock it more than gently.

He was, in the words of writer Rebecca Solnit, an “encounter with what else men could be.”

I was weird, and I hoped someone would notice. I wanted to be spotted, recognized for being the kind of girl I aspired to be.

I was only a kid when I noticed that other girls and women seemed to love babies, couldn’t wait to get their hands on them. I envied what seemed like their natural desire to nurture, to love, to care for. I also scorned it. I didn’t want to be like that, to play the role women are expected to play. I wanted it even less when I thought about the physical reality of birthing a baby, of pushing a human out of the small hole between my legs. The prospect of doing that with my own body seemed as unlikely as growing a tail.

Ours is the story of a set of circumstances that were tolerable in isolation, that felt normal and reasonable as we encountered them. It was only with time, and accumulation, that they became intolerable. It was okay until it wasn’t.

Can I be someone who can live with this? A quieter corollary: Who is that someone? Who was I, to ask for something other than everything I’d been given?

one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

She didn’t have to say more for me to hear it. I feared her judgment because it was my own.

Your whole life has been true. It happened to you.

I had always wanted to be good. I had stood by my husband, even as he made choices that I didn’t want. I’d raged, but I had recommitted again and again. I’d panted to do it all right. Can I be someone who can live with this? I’d contorted like an acrobat.

Surely I cannot be her mother if I am not also myself.

We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

I thought of those parachute games children play—the one where you raise your arms to lift the parachute high, as high as it’ll go, and then you quickly step under it and plop down along the edge, trapping the air inside. For a moment the parachute billows above your head like a circus tent. It feels like magic, like time stops. And then, of course, the parachute starts to deflate. Our marriage was like that: the way it was built, we couldn’t inhabit it. It was a structure that didn’t give shelter. This sky falls if we stop holding it up.

I want what matters to me to matter to you, and you’re allowed to want the same for yourself.

If I spend enough time feeling guilty, I decided, things will be okay. If I feel guilty enough, he will stop being angry with me.

The ability to leave a marriage that no longer works: What kind of character is this evidence of?

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst,” writes Sarah Manguso, “isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.”

At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

“I can remember, early on,” Nelson writes, “standing beside you . . . completely naked, . . . as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it.”

You have to be brave enough to break your own heart,

How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished?

But how was I supposed to trust what I wanted, when I knew very well that what I wanted could change?

But queerness should really make us realize that the common thread is only that we are all unique.

We don’t always look at each other when we talk, as though our words were for the room and not the other.

I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.

I find desire where gender crimps to reveal the person underneath it, because that’s where I myself want to be found.

I want to love differently this go-round—to not throw anybody, not even myself, away.

In the last years of her life, Ursula K. Le Guin published an essay in which she contemplated the formation of social institutions and their relationship to the sexes. Male solidarity, she wrote, has been the shaper of government, army, priesthood, and the thing we call the corporation. But as for female solidarity, she notes, “without it human society, I think, would not exist. Female solidarity might better be called fluidity—a stream or river rather than a structure. . . . Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.”