All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

What would remain of the things I had learned about history and science and literature, come four or five years, I did not know. 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.

We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.

Isn’t that the problem, she said. That the change is top-down. Everywhere.

Just because I don’t speak every question out loud doesn’t mean I don’t have questions!

It’s distressing, how many people elect to be boring when they have the option not to be.

The sight of her face sliced open my pretending.

I looked at the trees, some of them my height, and thought, You are here because I was here, because I made a choice that I barely considered.

For a time I was so happy that my own life appeared unreal, calling to mind phone pictures filtered to absurd saturation and luminosity, where dour midwestern skies were transformed to electric blue and everyone’s teeth blinded. So happy I was capable of setting on ice, for a period, any worries about work or cash flow or the consequences of my lies.

We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way. That is how heroin users and racist suburbenites and political revolutions are made. We say yes to something better! We dream of a pink house with land around it where all the people we love can live safe! We promise ourselves we will bring this to be!

Still, it felt like honest work in a way that the gig with Peter rarely had—there was something fraudulent and invented at the core of that world, even if I was too stupid to correctly articulate it.

That is the problem with Marina. She believes various unfortunate things about herself, thinks herself bad, like so many of us have been taught to. But she has a clean heart, goodness pumping through its ventricles. She is nearly always generous.

Because good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.