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Her sense of completeness relied on finding another to fill in the blanks.
She had been smitten and only later had she thought to question the fact that “smitten” came from the verb “to smite,” something more often associated with angry deities meting out dramatic lightning bolts of punishment and that, when she Googled the original etymology, actually meant “to smear or blemish” and wasn’t romantic at all.
Later, much later, she learned that survivors of sexual assault talk of things being “snatched away” from them—their dignity, their identity, or even, as in her case, their virginity—but Marisa always felt the opposite, as if something unwanted had forced itself into her, like shrapnel, and her entire self had to grow around it over the years that followed, warping the muscle and the skin out of shape until the scar became a misshapen part of her, something she simply had to live around.
But with Jake, she has found someone who accepts her as she is without too many questions, and when she fell in love with him, it was not accompanied by fireworks and a surging feeling of roller-coaster stomach leaping. It didn’t feel like a thunderbolt. It felt like something more beautiful than that. It felt like relief.
She realized he would probably die quite soon and when she thought of it, she felt a pang of incipient loss. Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.
She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that love felt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.
Carry a baby. It was such an odd expression. You carried shopping. You carried burdens. You carried viruses.
two flawed people, fitted into each other’s failings like ivy burrowing into the loosening gaps between brick. You couldn’t cut back the ivy without risking the house falling down. But the stone would crumble eventually, weakened by the insistent force of the plant pushing its thickening stem into every soft place. And then there would be collapse, a cloud of imploded stone. That is how it would end.
