Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.

“What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”

“There are no empty places,” she says, and I imagine her glancing at cue cards, clicking through slides. “However deep you go,” she says, “however far down, you’ll find something there.”

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.

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

Things are easy enough to recall, in isolation.

Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud.

The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

(Miri leaning toward me across the table in a bar—our third or fourth date—a sweet slur, I’ve been thinking about you, a bit. I bite the tips of my fingers and I think about you.)

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 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. Seems a bit of a joke in the circumstances, but still. Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know.”