Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it.

Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition:

What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent.

It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.

It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it’s very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.

is something Leah has always put down to the shifting of the air between two elements, the chilly liminality of water and earth. Standing at the place where one fades into the other, I have always been sure that I feel it: the sudden confusion. The air drawing taut between one stage and another. Looking out across the water and feeling my feet connected to something more solid than the plunging uncertainty beyond, I have always felt weighted, literal, a tangible creature connected to the earth.

I pressed my free hand to my chest and wondered how solid that could really be, how tangible anything about me might really be. Standing on the edge, I could feel it. The chill of the air, aching to become something else.

I remember the way that she looked at me, the open surge of her gaze, like I was something she’d invented, brought to life by the powers of electricity and set down there, in the last of the light.

I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move.

I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quieted, a froth of activity tapering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.

When I couldn’t think about Miri anymore, I gave up and thought instead about the imprints of deliquesced jellyfish, the brown and pink remainders—only imprints—fading to nothing on a white expanse of shore.

I love going into the cinema when it’s still light and then coming out in the dark. Makes me think about the way a city is never the same. I mean, the way everything changes. Every night, every minute, it’s over and things will never be the same again.

Something I find incredibly boring, Sam said, is everyone’s conviction that love is different for them. Somehow harder. Do you know what I mean? I just don’t think it’s that complicated, honestly—if you’re with the wrong person, it’s hard. It’s just another way of thinking you’re special, the way everyone does when they’re a teenager. You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting.

it seemed to haunt me about the flat as I tried to find a suitable place to put it, appearing at times to reflect not me but my mother’s empty house, as though on a time delay. I tapped the second knuckle of a finger lightly against the glass and it sounded like something knocking to be let in.

My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.

There was no sense of haunting, to be honest, only ongoingness, until one day he ceased to appear and I really felt fine about that, too.

There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.

Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean.

There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either. Does that make sense? I’m talking about the point at the very top of the ocean that is constantly evaporating and condensing, where water yearns toward air and air yearns toward water. I think about this sometimes, that middle place, the struggle of one thing twisting into another and back again.

trying my best to keep my mind along lines that did not seem calculated to hurt it.

When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.

Problem is, I read, that ultimately you’re really the one who has to kill them. Or not them but the idea of them—you have to make a choice to let it end.

I imagine that I have wandered the wrong way through some door and found myself in an alternative, uninhabited version of things, but then a car streaks past playing music and everything is the same as it was.

I sat in my mother’s chair near the windows and thought about the curious way she sometimes had of speaking to me more freely in bad weather, as though the rattle of sleet against the windowpanes might have served as a cover for her confidences. I used to think of it this way: with the rain, conversation. The atmosphere attempting openness and never quite achieving it, my mother returning to reticence before I ever had a chance to get a complete foothold.

The night is dark and Juna drives us into it and I feel vaguely doomed, vaguely certain of an ending I can’t see.

“I think,” Juna says, after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.”

“It’s hard when you look up and realize that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of. Let go of them in the water is something I read once.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.