Die, My Love

by Ariana Harwicz

How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals?

We’re one of those couples who mechanise the word ‘love’, who use it even when they despise each other.

I’m a woman who’s let herself go, has a mouth full of cavities and no longer reads. Read, you idiot, I tell myself, read one full sentence from start to finish.

I lay him down, wrapped up in my scarf, and while I swaddle him: Isadora Duncan. Who gets which life. What body do you end up in.

And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever.

I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit,

We kiss. Without tongue, like all married couples.

Since when did sitting down and having some water get rid of the desire to die?

if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it.

We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life?

How is it possible for my mother-in-law to speak so softly, walk so neatly, be so proper, and yet offer Prozac to a mother-to-be.

I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one. That matters more to me than his health insurance. And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance.

Night is falling and so it begins: the decline, the anxiety, the descent into an altered state.

She tells the family that her husband squeezed her hand tight just before he died, but that the doctor said it had only been a reflex reaction. It was then that I felt close to her for the first time.

There, in her space, I could feel the hatred that dug at her womb and I begged not to be infected by the depression she felt at having to live. Because she’s infectious, the bitch. Infectious and so beautiful.

Despite my violent lust, despite my desire to gobble her up, to inhale her, I didn’t move.

It’s a universal truth that at this time of day, when the light changes and things start to decline, objects either get cleared away or they get broken.

My future husband was being carried in that womb.

It might give everyone a shock now, a rush of adrenaline, but the time will come when the living and the dead will be indistinguishable.

That subtle difference of being, barely noticeable to a truck driver who passes a man taking a siesta by the roadside or one who’s recently been run over. A difference the truck driver would struggle to make out between one man lounging in the sun and another in the same position who’s just had a stroke. A lovely Sunday was had by all.

You’re hurting me, I said, plagiarising a diva’s pitiful wail.

When I have sex, I celebrate the birthdays of the departed. When I fall in love, like this very minute, as I shake myself, I scatter earth onto a coffin. It doesn’t matter whose. And when I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung. Hence the kiss. Because after all, since forever and since even before being born, and for the whole time my husband’s been shouting with jealous rage, I’ve been dead.

Desiring someone is like having a boiled sweet stuck to your neck, your scalp, your jugular.

Desire is an alarm I can’t turn off.

Not even digging a hole, a pit, would be enough. It needs to be thrown into the desert and devoured by wild beasts. Desire, that is.

‘Mrs Dalloway is a novel about time and the interconnectivity of human existence.’ How long has it been since I’ve heard that kind of language? Interconnectivity. Fucking hell.

I brought him into this world, and that’s plenty. I’m a mother on autopilot.

It’s official, I’ve been grounded. I want the day to end once and for all. I want night to begin, for them to let me out to face wild animals.

At first, I felt nothing but pain. The kind of pain a person doesn’t share, not even with herself. I was in mourning for a long time, but there came a moment when, like the widow who unlocks her front door for the first time, who eats dinner in silence for the first time, who gets into bed alone for the first time, I felt a sadness that was exhilarating, wild.