Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

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.

I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.

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.

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.

The world is folding over like a book whose past pages I cannot access.

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.

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.