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him, so attentive, so free of restlessness. He volunteered details about his life, and at first his openness confused me, because I dated men who were so guarded they made secrets of simple things.
He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him.
“I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.
“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”
drain. It was a sweet-and-sour time, a time of exquisite paradoxes. I raged at Nature but wanted to appease Nature, to secure the safety of my pregnancy. I obeyed the rules, dutiful and seething.
I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.
but I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?
If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.
How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,”
I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.
never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.
Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals.
