Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself.

Amanda nodded when she took calls, not for the benefit of the person on the other end of the phone but to prove to herself that she was engaged. Sometimes, amid the head nodding, she forgot to listen.

One of her most reached-for truisms was that some percentage of jobs were indistinguishable from one another, as they all involved the sending of emails assessing the job itself.

Sometimes her part in the charade felt silly and other times it felt urgent.

photographs on the website were a promise, and it was fulfilled:

He wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything.

What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

The kids cared only for what directly affected them, and they let very little affect them.

There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.

You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.

You had to be willing to lie, to be a mother or maybe just a person.

traditions just begin, somehow, then they end.

Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else’s life.

Ruth said it with hope. Her mother would have brought God into it—God willing, a reflex like drawing breath. They hadn’t scorned it, but they hadn’t learned that woman’s devotion. Maybe she was onto something. Maybe it was a folly to assume anything happened without someone—God, sure, why not him—willing it.

Older parents always said that to me when Archie was a baby, and I would think, Well, I can’t wait for this to go by. Because I was exhausted. But now I realize they were right.”

her parents had retired to Santa Fe, where her father painted terrible landscapes and her mother volunteered at a dog shelter. They were determined to enjoy the liberty of their old age in that strange place where it took longer for water to boil.

Nothing matters to children but themselves, or perhaps that is the human condition.

People dropped dead, but you still needed to eat dinner.

They were too busy, committed to the notion of their own overcommitment.

The rain was as it always was: hesitant at first, then confident.

That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse.

Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.

You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie. Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.

Ruth was afraid; once you had a kid, you knew to be afraid.

a parent was versed in vomit and worse, baptized in it, able, for the rest of life, to find not horror but pity.

It was terrible to be ashamed in front of your own child.