Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

“Carrie Lu gave me one piece of advice the last time I heard from her,” Ted told me as I was leaving. “She said, ‘Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying too often.’ I still think of it, sometimes more than once a day. I suppose it’s become one of the things I hear myself often saying … I’ve got that sort of problem, I suppose. Repeating myself, getting stuck.

Maybe this was just how it was in Milan, that no one here had ever met a stranger and everyone was governed by pleasure and immediacy.

Reverence kaleidoscopes the ordinary into the magnificent.

“I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation, do you understand?” he asked. “We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.”

What I am saying is, I think there was something wrong with me that year, or else there was something wrong with us, with X and me, and it was showing up in me, and though I sensed something was amiss, I couldn’t say what it was, and though most of the time I did not question the illusion I lived within, there were moments when I could see our life clearly and knew that everything was beautiful and nothing was right.