Weather

by Jenny Offill

The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?

One good thing about being addicted to sleeping pills is that they don’t call it “addicted”; they call it “habituated.”

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.

(Married sex is like taking off your own pants),

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious reassurance.