You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

There’s no such thing as a tell-all because we can only ever speak for ourselves.

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.

GOOD BONES 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.

“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.” Next question.

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.

I wanted to save my marriage, but I wanted to save it without anyone knowing it needed saving. That is some serious firstborn-daughter energy right there.

When I got good news related to my writing—a publication, a grant, an invitation—I sensed him wince inwardly. So I stopped sharing good news. I made myself small, folded myself up origami tight. I canceled or declined upcoming events: See, I’ll do anything to make this marriage work. I gave up income and professional opportunities, but those sacrifices didn’t save my marriage.

What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.

It was completely illogical: as if part of me wanted him back, and part of me wanted him to disappear, and nothing in between would do.

In all these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go? The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.

Sometimes I wonder what my adult children will tell their therapists, assuming they’ll have therapists. It’s all conjecture. Sometimes I want to tell them: I’ve tried to love you the right way.

You know what one of the saddest damn things is? One of the parts of all this that I’m grieving the most? When I lost my marriage, I lost all that shared history. I lost the person who knew me in a way no one else does, and when I lost him, I also lost being known like that.”