All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Considering what I was willing to say out loud.

grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

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.

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

I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes. You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission. It took a bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

How it might feel to gather tomatoes and squash from our garden, to be close to my parents as they grew old. How quietly lovely, the idea that I would never have to eat a meal alone again unless I wished to.

In that moment, though, it felt like someone had lifted my head off, vomited into the urn of my body.

registries are a wild American custom. my parents never had one, and they simply dealt with different relatives gifting them multiples of the same spice grinder and glass clock. wtf is an avocado slicer. bitch I’ll kill u

literally

Nothing is implied here besides the opiate nature of time.