Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me.

He would gather himself until he could once again present to his friends a reasonable semblance of happiness.

People can be unpredictable in their cruelty.

The worm he selects just that moment is severely bagged. There are dozens of smaller worms inside it. She’s old. She’s dense with bodies. Yet she’s still alive. She’s no mere vessel. No good to pick starved animals. Their descendants are born with a signal for disaster going off in their bodies.

He feels a small mercy at being left alone.

“I don’t have any skills to live in the world.” “Me either.” “But sometimes I’d like to live in it—in the world, I mean. I’d like to be out there with a real job, a real life.”

How can Cole, of all people, doubt himself, who he is, when the person he presents to the world is so carefully constructed?

His misery is not novel, but it is distinct.

But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.

She will say that he’s pitying himself, that he’s not special. That he is not alone in his feeling of inadequacy. And this is perhaps a little true. And it’s that small truth of it that makes it dangerous to him. They do not understand that for them it will get better, while for him the misery will only change shape.

“I think I would rather be alone,” Wallace says at the edge of a long thought, “but it doesn’t bother me to be with you.”

I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.

He cannot bring himself to spend more time outside in the world. He wants to sink down and down, hide himself.

He’s had enough of people and enough of the world. He’s had it. He’s full up.

That he wants to be alone. That he does not want to speak to anyone. That he does not want to be around anyone. That the world has worn him down. That he would like nothing more than to slip out of his life and into the next. That he is terrified, afraid. That he wants to lie down here and never move again. What he means is that he does not know what he wants, only that it is not this,

This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.

He is crying because he cannot recognize himself, because the way forward is obscured for him, because there is nothing he can do or say that will bring him happiness.

He is crying because he is lodged between this life and the next, and for the first time he does not know whether it is better to stay or go. Wallace cries and cries, until eventually he is hollow and empty and there’s nothing left to cry about, until he feels like he’s being rung like a bell.

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. An accounting of his body’s failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he’s been made and planted.

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.