All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit. As

As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment.

we dream, Tig’s pendulous writing said, of a hot tub full of women, lovers and friends.

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. It’s hard for me to think about the future. But it feels more possible, things feel more possible with you, when I’m not alone in it. I’m ready to change my life.

Years later I can look back on that moment and see it as the act of devotion it was, to pick up somebody’s disgusting mess and dispense with it. The kind of thing my parents would have done for me. That I would do for those I love most. In that moment, though, it felt like someone had lifted my head off, vomited into the urn of my body.

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.

On lifting the shoebox lid, my bath bombs explode the air with scent. When I tip them in, the whole box’s worth, the chalky spheres bob in the water, harmless and bland. Fizzing slightly. Then they metamorphose. Pastel and neon and iridescent foam roars out their sides. They have names, somewhere. Intergalactic. Melusine. Sex Bomb. Twilight. Incredulously I laugh and laugh and laugh into the silence of the tiled room, beyond thought or language, ducking my head under the iridescent froth, only coming up, every part of me wild with glitter and color, once I can no longer breathe.

In my adult life I had come to understand some things about addiction, some truths about what it meant to live as a wounded person, the past a refrain of illness within you, always summoning you back to the specter of your hunger.

The notion flows from my conversation with Tig—love as a commitment, practice, a perpetual recovery.