Cult Classic

by Sloane Crosley

Being a kid is like this. Your parents pack you a suitcase full of pedagogical messaging and by the time you’re grown, it turns out most of the items were perishable anyway. You have to start over, pack your own bag.

What you were trying to tell us is that, like ghosts, each of us would sacrifice anything—money, sanity, security—for a chance to go back in time, to make sense of our choices, of the unholy mess that is ourselves.

Who, in the history of the world, has ever had any double-sided tape?

My fiancé to whom I was engaged to be married, a person I’d swindled into a lifetime of mutual tolerance.

May our gaslights illuminate the bridges we burn!

The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men.

When we were falling in love, he’d enumerate the ways in which I was not like other women, listing traits such as intelligence and sanity—leaving me with the choice of rejecting the compliment or betraying my entire gender.

If asked about fatherhood, he would talk about how exciting it would be to teach his son to throw a football and ride a bike. I resented how reality-free this fantasy was. If I were to express excitement about having a little girl because then I could have someone to dress up, I would be deemed unfit to breed.

The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith.

“Okay, you founded a mind control cult with an espresso machine in it. I’m very happy for you.”

This was before I knew that the timing of a cruel thing does not make it more or less cruel, before I knew the only good way to hurt someone is never.

“Everyone is living separate narratives. Marriage is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”

Men who broke up with me because I was too good for them. Ah, but when do we send our food back to the kitchen because it’s too delicious?

“Everyone feels like if only they had been more or less tolerant, if they could commit to a version of themselves, they could be with anyone they’d ever dated.” “Umm,” Vadis said, “no one thinks that.” “Then they’re not thinking about it hard enough. Romance without practicality is a fling. Love is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”

Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So

“All love is, is the process of deciding on familiarity.”

In fact, if I’d assumed anything about Howard, it was that I’d never see him again. The only remnant of Howard in my possession was a postcard he’d once given me for his sister’s art show. On the back, he’d written, “please cum?” which he quite sincerely meant as slang for “attend?” Not the most cunning of linguists, our Howard.

I was a sane person imitating a broken person imitating a sane person, which did not feel sane, not at all.

Everyone has had that inkling, right? Like for some reason you are just not meant to pair. And on your good days, you think, hey, it’s because my heart is too big to get through anyone’s tunnel. And on your bad days, you think it’s because my heart is this tiny petrified piece of shit and it passes through other people like a kidney stone. Like it’s either nothing or it causes excruciating pain.”

Your hang-ups aren’t in your system, they are your system.

But I don’t think you’re normal. And I love you and it sucks.”

I think, if closure exists, it’s being okay with a lack of it. It’s to be found in letting the doors swing open, in trusting that if hinges were meant to be locks, well, then they’d be locks.