All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I want an excuse to change my life.

There was some part of me too sensitive for it and I was not yet confident I wanted that to die.

This is how I felt: alone and powerful. This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.

What was the point of knowing anything, of learning how to think, that favorite phrase of my American teachers, if all it did was burnish my contempt for the mentally negligible project managers and associate division directors all around me? I should have majored in Microsoft Excel.

I use the present tense, but I mean, that’s the way I remember it, and these are the things I learned about it, later, and the two combined have formed my truth of a place. We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.

How unbearable it is to desire what another person can deny you.

To be generous felt like the best thing you could be.

I like you lots. I want to be your friend, I said. I felt abashed and earnest and yearning and very very young. It was the truth.

Friendship is work, she said. Friendship is work, and a commitment, and a practice. I don’t know if you share that view. I think I do? To like, the extent I’ve thought about it.

did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

For once I did not care. I closed my eyes and smiled to the cold sky, holding my friends and these kind strangers in my arms.

My time in Milwaukee has been mostly work, and then wines and reading and TV, like maybe trying to not kill my new plants—struggle city.

This book called Never Let Me Go. At first I was going to give up on it, but all of a sudden there was one part that almost made me cry, and I love to cry, I sometimes think I should be a professional crier, and anyway, I’ve kept with it.

I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions, get them outside of our bodies, and then our body feels light and free again.

It was strange, how living long periods of time with a person could reveal them. Like holding a check to the light.

How will we learn about the world if not from each other?

Quantum units in a box. Sometimes they were waves and sometimes particles. In fact they were both, but any one observer could only perceive them as one at a given moment in time. They collapsed into a steady state when observed.

Sometimes green and blue collapse. Indistinct. Smudge into sameness. We know this. You could look at each of them and think, These are the same, only different based on who is looking. The way I had trained myself to think, I hovered between each of these quadrants,

It’s never too late, she said in my ear. That’s what Rion told my mother. I was a kid, listening at the door. I never forgot it. He said this. While two people are still alive to try, he said, it’s never too late, and it’s never the end.

sounds sweeter than you’re making it seem, Tig wrote back to me. Hospitality and investment in each other, going to people’s homes, not just restaurants. That’s the shit that builds community, you know.

This cycle, you know, of pressures, then rebellion, then freedom, and then choosing the traditional path of one’s own choice, that is how we all understand, now, what it means to be young.

We’re taught that everything is finite and zero sum, Tig said. Money, food, houses, freedom. Zero sum when it ain’t need to be. The whole thing is that some things multiply. Create feedback loops. Like love and honesty. Like generosity. Creates more of the thing itself.

We could organize our lives a different way.

we dream, Tig’s pendulous writing said, of a hot tub full of women, lovers and friends. They would hold house meetings to process dispute and idea. In time they would build, on the Pink House lot’s southern edge, tiny insulated homes for people who were homeless in the city. They would share money, they would protect any family member who fell upon hard times, they would never have a landlord again, they would in this manner grow old together.

This is what it means, to come here as an immigrant. You are here on sufferance. You are a form of currency, not a person, and only a person has the right to desire, which is to say, to be difficult.

lay in bed and looked on Facebook at other people’s lives, feeling a degree of disbelief that anyone in the world had energy enough to get engaged, start a dream job, move cross-country, travel.

my brain feeling smooth and clean like it had been run through a car wash.

How quietly lovely, the idea that I would never have to eat a meal alone again unless I wished to.

I’m ready for my life to go better. I also just want to say—you know you’re remarkable, right? When I think about your life, when I think about the hand you’ve been dealt, and the actual shit you turn to gold, I’m—it’s very moving to me.

We all need help sometime.

It was only later that I thought back on this moment and realized she might not, actually, have known these things I believed patently obvious simply because they were pressing on me with the force of a landslide.

I felt the terror I would come to be ever better acquainted with in the years that followed, at the fragility of bodies, the bodies of everyone I loved; we are, at the close of things, bags of meat and blood encasing what’s ensouled: mercurial, flickering, holy.