Sundial

by Catriona Ward

I don’t know what it’s like for other people but love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me.

I sometimes confuse my children’s bodies with my own.

This is family life, in my experience. Always trying to do things like the families in magazines or on TV, followed by the abrupt plummet of failure.

I don’t even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.

I said I felt safe here. Maybe what I meant was that my children are safe. Those two things don’t always go together. Maybe at some point everyone has to choose between one and the other.

There are startling, unexpected patches of relief in her personality.

He never touches me – he points instead. His stabbing finger trembled an inch from my face, jabbing in time with his words. ‘You wanted this,’ he said. ‘It’s all you wanted when we met. Now you’ve got it all you can do is whine.’

The mess of adult life, where you’ve both dug in so deep, where blame is a tapestry so tightly woven that it cannot ever be unpicked.

I believe that everyone has one story that explains them completely.

if there were two of them, maybe he’d let me have some of their love.

She’s the kind of person I imagined having as a friend when I was young, before I understood what friends were.

‘When you look at each other you go all black and fuzzy.’

It’s funny how you forget so much about labour – the pain and sound of splitting flesh. It’s self-defence. The body’s kindly editing, to protect the mind.

It’s terrible when everything around you seems like a metaphor for your life.

There are things that cannot be said in a marriage without changing it forever.

But that is not what unthinkable means. I understand that, now. It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shapes in your mind. It is poison and madness flowering behind your eyes.

The expression in her eyes doesn’t change; remains vague, as if she’s having another conversation that I can’t hear.

Memory is a noose around the neck. Sometimes it tightens on me so strongly that I can’t breathe.

The past always has its hands around your neck, doesn’t it?’

Sometimes it feels like everything is happening right now, in my skin, the past and the present and the future all mixed together,

They’re adult wallpaper, uninteresting.

Mia feeds the fire pit and smiles at us, friendly. I feel uncomfortable when she does that. It’s as if she knows what we’re doing and doesn’t care. Or maybe forgives us, which is worse.

Hating Mia seems to take up so much of our energy. Sometimes I wish we could lay it down for a while, like a heavy backpack.

But we love them – or need them. Those two things can get mixed up.

You can only do three things with danger: run away from it, fight it, or make friends with it.

It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?

Once again I feel that particular double stab of guilt and resentment – the suspicion that Mia is a better person than me.

As for me, I mistake intensity for passion, like many people, I suppose. I feel like this is real life, at last.

(It’s these little details between people that sometimes seem to spell the future, when you look back on them.)

I seemed to be held together with cobweb. Each part of me wants to fly apart.

Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You’ve got to make sure they’re surrounded by good things.

it’s almost like I can hear the important things inside her break.

Moms are like the desert, too. Sometimes you can’t stop them.