Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

Up until this point I had spent a lot of time talking myself out of the things I liked so that I could be a different, better kind of person.

We were taught to value love yet not to rely on it too heavily, because the world of excessive freedom in which we had been made would not foster the long-suffering loyalty that love required.

I wanted to believe that his control was ugly. Yet, faithlessly, I was eager for it.

Almost every time he spoke to me I felt simultaneous relief and fear.

I was thinking of what Nathan had taught me: that the only real way to fail, to fuck badly, is to know what you want and to extract it from another person.

I think I told you I dated this boy in college. He was horrible to me. Just cruel, abusive, he treated me horribly. I can’t really explain it all. But, you know, I do think sometimes I’m attracted to this—to giving myself up to something like this…something consuming. With its own rules.

I had always thought that freedom was the power to understand what I could and live by it—to talk myself into things. It seemed to me now that freedom was the strength and the space to follow what moved me. What I had to reconcile myself to was being subject to my emotion, which I would always be striving to comprehend. What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life?

There was nothing rational in my feeling but it was the most generous feeling I could remember.