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You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. MARGARET ATWOOD, CAT’S EYE
Even then I knew there was something depressing about the excitement of grown men. The expectation that the world is really meeting them halfway.
As we gave the goodnight hugs we all said what we were going to do next. This was something we always did. It was like, if we knew what the other person was going to do, somehow we’d still be hanging out even when we were apart.
Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.
“Of course,” Helen goes on, “it’s convenient if the sacrificial victim’s been elevated to the level of a Madonna, or condemned as a whore, either’s sufficient. Just deprive the victim of their humanity, relieve the community of the burden, the human burden, of recognizing themselves in the scapegoat, of accepting any complicity in their fate, because psychologically, these people—”
Helen’s always talked about abstract stuff to avoid talking about her feelings. Or, she finds it easier to have feelings about abstract stuff than ordinary stuff. I don’t mind. I’ve missed her fury. She’s ranting away on my arm but I know this is her way of saying, “I’m broken-hearted, Mush. I’m devastated.”
She has to dress up her emotions in attitude, the way I dress up mine in quiet. But she knows I know that about her, and she knows that about me, too. So we’re having this whole other, deeper conversation between us, right now, without needing to speak it, cos it’s always been this way with us. Some people you can just know.
What kept snagging your eye were all the upstairs lights, the glowing bedrooms, where kids were being kids. Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.
Get to know anyone and that’s what happens; they shed one layer of mystery after another, the dismal burlesque towards their inevitable ordinariness.
The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction.
So maybe life is just a load of flows affecting each other, in all directions. And holding grudges or, like…say you get caught inside one fixed idea of things, and you’re always clinging to it or whatever…that shit puts a block inside you. So now the river’s gotta move around this big fuck-off rock, and the more rocks you add to it, the more it starts flowing in weird ways, awkward diversions and stuff. And now you’re blocked up inside yourself, so you start to put blocks outside yourself too, in the world. Y’know? But even if you’re putting all your energy into saying no to life, making sure
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Your self isn’t some ‘deep down’ thing that exists, away in some other place, separate from your day-to-day. Like, there is no other place. You’re always here. Becoming what you are.”
All the burning points of life—birth and death, loss and recovery—cradled in an impersonal space. The hot core of the world, raging beneath a calm surface.
It looks like something they might have done when she was a few years younger, but experiences like what she has been through tend to make people older and more childlike at the same time. Time goes crooked, folds itself inside the body.
It takes strength to be open to life, to the possibility things will change for the better.
