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He told me that suffering makes a person special, fills a soul with angular gems of transcendent knowledge, so many perspectives contained within each one. I asked him how I could find those gems and use them, and he said he didn’t know. I asked him why me and he said he didn’t know that either. I pointed out that some people who suffer turn into Charles Manson, and he said that Charles Manson’s problem wasn’t suffering, but that no one loved him, not even his mother, Ralph had seen a show about it on TV. And that even though my mother was selfish, it sounded like she still loved me. “All a
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I could have loved you so much, Laura, you stupid fucking asshole, but you just couldn’t do it, you were just too mean, sucking everything pleasant from a room. The private alarm of losing track of a spider on your ceiling, that was what it felt like to be in a room with you.
If she had any sense of herself at all, it was as a seed, carried by some shuddering and indifferent wind, waiting to be dropped into the place that would finally make her real. To lose this sense of yourself must surely be awful, but maybe, she thinks, it’s worse to die without ever knowing yourself at all.
The work of women’s clothes never more important than at the beginning and the end of their lives when it’s tasked with broadcasting, as loudly as possible: please don’t try to have sex with me.
I love you, Carol. I’m sorry I wanted to kill you for a minute there, but I’m over it now.
He didn’t even come close to killing me. Could never have killed me. Because I’m already dead, I realize that now. I’m the dead one, Ralph, do you see now? You can have us both, you can have us both. Empty. Indestructible. And finally I understand that this is who I am, my something is nothing. Infinite nothing. Absolute power. Never hurt. Never ruined.
