The Half Moon

by Mary Beth Keane

But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.

that waiting for something to happen was exhausting,

he wondered if it were possible to change, to end up in a life completely different from the one he thought he was in.

Charm was a performance for other people,

But when a person dreams of partnering with someone for life, no one ever considers the fact that there’s no dependable way to communicate a thought except to say it.

No, it was something else about home that was strangling her, the notion that what’s important to one person must be important to everyone.

Also, they’d discuss it after, with each other. They’d do it out of concern, but she didn’t want concern; she wanted a concrete solution.

She wanted a cure for grief and she wanted someone to tell her where to find it.

The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.

How much courage it must have taken to break his life open and change it.

I don’t know him, she reminded herself then and now. Not really.

Malcolm could drink twenty Manhattans and still remain a vault. That’s why people told him things.

Life was ticking by, day by day, and it was dawning on him lately that the distance between his present life and his future was getting shorter every minute.

The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.