You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

The Finder didn’t lose the future, only her knowledge about it. She lost the narrative. The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot. The ellipsis is where the sentence trails off, where you drop the thread, where the train of thought steams off in some unknown direction. The ellipsis is where you lose your partner, or your parents, or your child, or the idea of a child, or the hope for a child. The ellipsis is where you lose your house, or your job, or your health, or your appetite, or your ability to sleep. Maybe you lose twenty pounds. Maybe you lose your ability to make small talk, to act like everything is fine, to say “fine” when people ask you how you are. Maybe… Dot dot dot. And the sentence could pick up again anywhere. Or it could dissolve into silence for some time.

It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story? Or, rather, making sense of what is happening. When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own: “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.

My daughter was shocked because she believed—and I had led her to believe—that people are good. And that there is consensus about what “good” is. That the choice is always clear. But most of the time, “good” and “bad” aren’t so easy to discern. In stories there are good guys and bad guys. In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.

The year of Rilke written on a yellow sticky note, pressed to one of my office windows, referred to daily: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”