Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

I looked up at the windows where I’d lived in such happy squalor, and cried. How completely idiotic I was being. It makes no sense to grieve years. Be reasonable. Go home.

How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away.

Let’s not speak of such things, she said, and this became our agreement. New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands.

It’s not that the people of the ST who were oppressed for their gender, poverty, or race were duped—as so many in the North seem intent on believing—but rather that their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again.

Whatever happens to you, you put it onto a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from recording the movement of clouds across the sky and calling it a film—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back to where you came from for years and years.

the world only exists insofar as it exists between people.

She always told her story as if it were memorized, verbatim … And don’t you think that there are times—say, on a really wonderful day—that maybe even the worst memories are fine? Then the opposite, too, a terrible day—your lover leaves you, you can’t zip your pants, your cat runs away—when even the best things in your life seem a bit ugly, don’t they?… So it’s natural, isn’t it? You tell the story of your life differently as it goes along. Otherwise the boredom would kill us …

“I can’t understand why I made this trip, except in the hope that there is something good in being so unhappy—as if I might use up my large portion of unhappiness + have only joy left.”†