Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

But he didn’t know me anymore, as the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew.

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

“You have to get through—how to put it?—shame, essentially, yes that’s it—the shame and boredom of talking about yourself.” She later added, “Shifting between so many names, between selves—it must have relieved some of that shame.”‡‡

he’d never contended with her presence deeply enough to imagine that her presence might be contingent upon anything.

New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands.

the world only exists insofar as it exists between people.

my immature wish for anyone who had ever come before me to vanish forever and leave no shadow.

I recognized my own old hopes in that unattainable plan—to both carry a child and immediately cease to be a body that had carried the child, to be completely entrenched then completely excused from the process. To be, in short, a father.