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.

The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah.

I wished, with a vehemence that felt vaguely misplaced, that I had thought to bring a deck of cards with me. I imagined the three of us sitting at the bottom of the ocean and playing old maid.

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. Visiting her brought with it the implication that you regarded her as lonely, failing to visit her was an insult all its own.

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

As we sank, I tried to recall this story, though as I did so I felt the strangeness of attempting to soothe myself with the very element currently building to unsurvivable pressure over my head.

She is a good friend, inasmuch as she is a present friend, or at least a friend who likes to make plans. And yet too often I find myself stoppered by unwillingness to admit to basic frustrations, to look at her across a coffee shop table and respond to her humdrum admissions with a straight me, too.

The doctor explained that hypochondria’s very insidiousness lay in its creeping logic, in the ways it purported to make sense.

Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person—but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.

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.

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

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.