Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

Need. It was a word that my father seldom used. I’d heard him say want, and expect. But there was never anything like need, a word that implied helplessness and frailty.

Need, my father had written. To need meant to be vulnerable. It was one of the scariest things I could imagine. Needing anything meant you were open to invasion. It meant you had no control of yourself.

Smell, I’d learned, was something that would always be able to sucker-punch me.

Want and need. Two words from my dad’s letter that meant so much and so little. I never knew what I wanted. And I didn’t want to need anything. Better to need nothing; nothing never hurt you when it left.

You don’t know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out.

Mostly we retold the same old stories, nostalgia over things we’d rehashed a thousand times before, varnishing the memories so they shone and hiding all the bad parts. I often wondered why we couldn’t talk about the present, why the past held all the promise while the future sat before us like stagnant water.

Hunched over the wheel, white-knuckling on the stick shift, she looked frail and small. Not the kind of person who could bring someone to orgasm in a public parking lot. There was danger in being around a person so malleable. She could be anything I wanted: sweet, shy, hard, careful. Loveable. Her layers were cracking open. I worried what I’d discover about myself if I dug into her too deeply.

Who was I to tell him that the thing he thought was truth was really just a woman trying to manufacture a normal life for herself?

We spent so much time looking for pieces of ourselves in other people that we never realized they were busy searching for the same things in us.

Love was a thing that needed constant care. Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.

“Intimacy means giving up parts of yourself to someone, even when that means they can hurt you very badly. But sometimes we let them because pain can feel good too.”