Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

The flurry of easygoing taunts made Wallace feel a little sad, the kind of private sadness you could conceal from yourself until one day you surfaced and found it waiting.

He could caramelize onions, reheat the chop, slice bread from the corner bakery, the hard, crusty kind, soak it in grease or batter to fry. Wallace saw it all in his mind’s eye: the meal made up of leftovers, converted into something hearty and fast and hot. It was one of those moments in which anything seemed possible. But then the moment passed, a shift in the shadow falling over the table.

But it was automatic, this reflex to turn to lab, because as long as they were talking about science they didn’t have to attend to other worries. It was as if graduate school had wiped away the people they’d been before they arrived.

It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must.

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

She hates him because he works, but he works only so that people might not hate him and might not rescind his place in the world. He works only so that he might get by in life on whatever he can muster. None of it will save him, he sees now. None of it can save him.

a person doesn’t belong to you just because you’re in a relationship, just because you love them. That people are people and they belong only to themselves, or so they should. Miller can do whatever he wants with whomever he wants, is the thought that flashes through Wallace. He has a jealous heart. Love is a selfish thing.

It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.

but she won’t say anything either, can’t bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it.

Zoe seems nice, but in the way that white people are nice right before they perform some new role in the secret machinery that ruins black people’s lives.

But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.

There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen.

The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.

Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life’s history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body.

It’s not even that he wants to be them—though queer desire has this feature baked in, so better to say it’s not just that he wants to be them. He wants to be not himself. He wants to be not depressed. He wants to be not anxious. He wants to be well. He wants to be good.