Our Souls at Night

by Kent Haruf

No, not sex. I’m not looking at it that way. I think I’ve lost any sexual impulse a long time ago. I’m talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably. Lying down in bed together and you staying the night. The nights are the worst. Don’t you think?

I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think. I’ve done that too long—all my life. I’m not going to live that way anymore.

I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.

Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you’re not just all dried up after all.

But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.

So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.

She had stopped going to any church because of her feelings about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.

We had that long time of joined life, even if it wasn’t good for either one of us. That was our history.

She never really got what she wanted from me. She had a kind of idea, a notion of how life should be, how marriage should be, but that was never how it was with us. I failed her in that way. She should’ve had somebody else.

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.

You can’t fix things, can you, Louis said. We always want to. But we can’t.

No. Hell. I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day. And come sleep with you at night.