Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

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

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.

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

I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.

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.

In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve.

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 hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse. I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.

You know, she said, with the portentousness of the evening’s many whiskeys, 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.

I put my hands over her hands, still fisted in the lapels of the coat she had given me, and made her pull me forward. That makes no sense, I told her, and she kissed me in the street.

Something has crested the surface between us and sunk again, the water closing over its head.

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.

The world was different once, dry, before a century of rain that filled the oceans.

Things continue. This is something I have always found: unfortunately, things go on.

I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me. My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.

A ghost that speaks is just a demon, trying to tempt you into making that mistake.”

To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things—the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge—is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture. In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful.

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.

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.

These are all things that I know, but none of this is really important. I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.

When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache—that it was simply a case of things getting in past the rib cage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, insofar as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.