I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation?

I’d forgotten about the light at Granby. It was different there, older, passing through centuries before it reached you. Outside in winter, it came down in needles; inside, it fell like soup.

The one where the men finally told about the priests, decades later, and everyone lauded their bravery. The one where the women came forward after five years, and everyone asked why they hadn’t spoken sooner.

It was the one where the witness wasn’t considered credible because six years earlier, she’d accused another man of the same thing, and it was easier to believe she was lying than that lightning loves a scarred tree.

I’d been back in close touch with Carlotta since the advent of social media. My generation only missed each other’s twenties.

This is beautifully horribly true.

Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.

How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.

A room is never drunker than when you’re the sober person.

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

I knew that in thirty years, there’d be a steady stream of regular obituaries describing lives well lived. But this middle phase, these deaths of people in their early forties, felt the cruelest. Maybe because there were always kids involved, ones far too young to leave behind.

The teenager somewhere in me, watching from 1995, was bewildered by it all. I whispered to her: “It’s not what you think.”

But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.