Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

Remembers too the salty taste of Miller’s skin, so different from his own, the bodies of others somehow always so different, as if made from rare elements, strange metals.

You can’t know how beautiful the sun is there, how it touches everything and soaks it through, succulent, like water, like moisture. Light beading on the skin, dew, glistening. So much light, an ocean of it, a sea of light spread across everything.

Just because you say you’re sorry, or you say that someone doesn’t deserve something, does not erase the facts of what has or has not happened, or who has or has not acted.

His brother’s voice was like those old boyhood prayers they used to say before they went to bed, nonsense words to Wallace even then, and yet somehow necessary to get through it.

But when Wallace looks at such people, people he wants, he always feels so much worse afterward. 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.

A good body is a monstrous thing; it stalks and hunts us in the smallest parts of ourselves.

He’s holding Wallace against him, cradling his body almost. It would be tender if it weren’t also a choke hold. Wallace might let himself give in to such an embrace, if it didn’t also contain the threat of violence—not

Is this all his life is meant to be, the accumulation of other people’s pain? Their assorted tragedies?

he learned then that some things have no reason, that no matter how he feels, he isn’t entitled to an answer from the world.

such a display would have felt vulgar in a way, that to make so gross a statement about his feelings, or his attitude, seemed too direct, too intrusive.

Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden,

This could be their life together, each moment shared, passed back and forth between each other to alleviate the pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold on to time for oneself.