Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

I fear I am the sort of person who needs to feel some measure of fear in order to love someone.

when he kissed me good night, gripping me by the shoulders, I felt that I was a towel with which he was drying himself, a prone and useful thing.

People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.

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.

No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

X often spoke of the truth as if it were a stable, glowing object—something just within her grasp

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

“Men must just be ‘abandoned to themselves,’ Carla says here. ‘Not in anger. Not in hatred. Just abandoned. We’re not their counterparts, and they are not ours.’

I’d never, ever reached the end of anything, even things I was glad to be done with, with any feeling other than grief. Every school and university I’d ever attended, for instance, had provided nothing but miserable, friendless years, yet I cried at every graduation.

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.