Our Souls at Night

by Kent Haruf

No. But I think I’m in love a little with the memory of her.

I’m sure she felt rejected and mistreated. She had good reason to feel that way. And that was picked up by our little girl from her mother and probably is a part of her feeling now about men, including me. She has the feeling she has to be a certain way or she’ll be abandoned.

You’re acting like a teenager. I never acted like this as a teenager. I never dared anything. I did what I was supposed to.

Well, Diane stayed herself anyway, Louis said. Throughout. As I say I can appreciate that now. I didn’t then, at the time. 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.

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. Except I still say that this isn’t true of you and me. Not right now, not today.

I guess he can walk on water, but he can’t keep it from falling on his head.

But even now I can see it all clearly and feel that kind of otherworldliness, the sense of moving in a dream and making decisions that you didn’t know you had to make, or if you were sure of what you were saying.

I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day. And come sleep with you at night.

You don’t understand yet, do you. I don’t want to be alone and brood like you do working things out by myself. I want you to come over so I can talk to you.

I know what I think of you and how much you mean to me. But I can’t get it in my head that I mean anything like the same to you.

They still held each other in the night when he did come over but it was more out of habit and desolation and anticipated loneliness and disheartenment, as if they were trying to store up these moments together against what was coming.