But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits

by Kimberly Harrington

I used to believe life was a straight line containing a series of stages. And within each stage there was a beginning, middle, and end. But what I’ve discovered is life is instead a series of loops, growing in circumference and range as we age, always finding a way to deposit us right back on land we thought we had long ago left behind. At first I dreaded reading my high school and college diaries because the story I had told myself as time went on was I was just a dumb girl who liked dumb bands, dumb boys, and had dumb dreams. I told myself I would run away, to be smarter and cooler, to be more pure and have better ideas. I would be honest, always, even though women were never rewarded for honesty. I would be a better mother and a better partner and I would never have limits on my love. My parents and my friends and every man I had ever been with had limits and I had never forgiven any of them for it. As much as I initially cringed through the level of detail in some of my entries, tempted to wing each and every one of those notebooks into Lake Champlain (look, I jotted down that I had held a man’s gold necklace in my teeth while he fucked me, a man I recall not at all, and there’s nothing I can do about that now), there was one takeaway from all of it. I was always in there. I had always been me.