You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

That life—the past, the beforelife, the beforemath—was a boat. I was on it with my husband, and later our daughter joined us, and still later, our son. The sea was sometimes calm, and we could see right down into the water. We could see everything beneath us. I felt like we were being held—kept afloat, buoyed—by everything we saw. Other times the sea was rough and gray, ruffles on the waves when they curled over and broke. There are stowaways in so many stories about long journeys across the sea. There are storms—the water gnawing at the hull, desperately wanting to find its way inside. There are shipwrecks. But sometimes it is less dramatic but more tense. There is something moving, dark and slow, in the water beneath the boat—something you don’t want to see, but you have to see it. Otherwise, what passes for plot?

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.

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.

I am a half-double now—half a couple, half a whole.

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

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.

Inside current me, the me who has two children, is the me who dreamed two others. The me who lived in fear, then grief, then fear, then grief again, then fear.

The past is stacked ceiling-high, and we have to pack and label everything using only our teeth. We have to pack it all if we want to carry it forward. Imagine all there is for us to sort: years and years and years. Moldering cardboard and mice nesting in it. One child, then two.

We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

It could have begun there, in that room, with all of those people watching. He’s so proud of her, some of them probably thought. They’re so happy together.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I hoped he’d hear I’m the same, I’m just me, I’m right here.

Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.

For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.

Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. —Maggie Nelson

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a “woman’s weapon.” It has been a very long war. —Heather Christle

A scar tells a story, a very short story about pain, injury, healing—what so much great literature is about. A scar is concise communication. The white hyphen on my wrist from the clasp of my watch tells a story. I don’t have that watch anymore, or the apartment I lived in then, or the person I lived with, but the punctuation—the symbol for connection, yoking one word to another, making a new whole—is still here. The little white line under my son’s chin, an em dash, tells a story. He slipped and fell in the bathtub, only three years old, and as I lifted him from the water I saw his bone, the skin pulled away like pictures in books of seals, whales, the layer of fat under the slick skin. I rocked and sang him to sleep, naked, swaddled in a damp bath towel, one corner held against his chin to stop the bleeding, while we waited for his father to come home from an evening event and drive us to the hospital. The long pink line where my daughter left my body, then my son, tells a story. A door opened, then shut, then opened and shut again. But I have stood ajar since the moment I became a mother.

Writing is work that can hold up its head with all the other kinds of useful work out there in the world, and it is genuinely work. —Rebecca Solnit

I thought, maybe the relationship with The Addressee ended, and he’s looking for someone local. Maybe we can move on from that part of the story.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”