Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

No good to pick starved animals. Their descendants are born with a signal for disaster going off in their bodies.

There can only ever be a tenuous claim on the lives of others.

There are no wishes to be found in salt water, no magic there at all except, in some cases, the way it turns to stars when dispersed, as from the tip of a finger with a breath.

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.

Kindness is a debt, Wallace thinks. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation.

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.

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. 6

There are ways to wrangle a body’s dimensions, but these dimensions correspond solely to the physical space it occupies. How to wrangle the body that is unreal? How to wrangle the histories of our bodies, which are inseparable from the bodies themselves and are always growing? How to change or shape that part of us?

“You think that, if I hurt you sufficiently, you will feel sufficient guilt to get you through this. Because you feel like a monster. But I don’t owe that to you,” Wallace says. “I don’t owe you any more pain than I’ve already dealt you. It’s selfish