Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

part of me had blinked out of existence right along with you—another consequence of the marital union—and what was left in the aftermath only retained the barest essence of a human being.

I’m of the opinion that when it comes to secrets, there is no end to what we don’t know about a person. Even the person who sleeps next to us and shares our lives.

No one thinks when they first meet a person that there is some cosmic clock counting down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until you will stop knowing each other.

as if wearing your seatbelt made it impossible to drive in reverse).

😂 So relatable.

Grief hates a moving target.

We’re all so shocked, right? As if it wasn’t staring us in the face the whole goddamn time.”

Sadly, yes. This is all too common.

“When a woman has an affair, it’s the man who pays for the hotel room. It’s only the chivalrous thing to do.”

What if she was having an affair with a woman?

When the Good Lord says, ‘Come with me,’ we don’t have no choice. We have to go. And He holds us there and comforts us.”

The body was most likely carried by the river’s current for several miles, the pale and naked arms ghosting through underwater fronds, a sneaker coming loose and gradually climbing toward the surface where it bobbed and rocked, unnoticed by anyone, like a tiny seagoing vessel. The glint of a gold ankle bracelet may have attracted the attention of curious fish. The girl’s body thumped against the occasional underwater rock formation, maneuvered through tangles of submerged tree limbs, wove between the taut lines of crab pots like an actor weaving between cables backstage in a theater.

I don't know why, but this whole passage really gets me.

“We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”

“I don’t think like a murderer, Aaron. I don’t know.”

I feel like this is simple, but often lost when trying to solve crime. Average people who don't murder just can't make themselves think like someone who does.

This was a place for serious drinkers—people who did not come for a good time or to simply burn a paycheck, but career alcoholics who opted for the only form of acceptable suicide, which was to drink themselves to a premature death.

“Fear,” he said. “Used to be something like this happened, it was an anomaly. It didn’t fit in with the fabric of the world, and so people could afford to be horrified not only by the violence and terror of it, but by the sheer absurdity, the impossibility of it. That kid in Texas takes potshots from the university observation deck, kills over a dozen people, and the country is petrified not just by horror but by disbelief. That was in the sixties. Back then, something like that, people could watch it and still not relate to it. Something like that would never happen to them, right? But now, it’s like every week there’s something on the news. People are no longer exempt. It’s no longer an absurdity. So what do they do? They try to erase it from the public consciousness as quickly as possible. None of us are just spectators anymore. We’ve all got a stake in the game.”

woof. that's dark, but so accurate.

“You wallow in dark stuff, Aaron, and monsters tend to float to the surface.

I’m not sure where the truth stopped and the bullshit started,” I admitted. “Exactly,” you said. “That’s exactly what it was like living in Woodvine.”