You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

What is the crisis, exactly: traveling through your life on a track, on the force of your own momentum, at the mercy of your own momentum, the landscape only a blur? And what is the remedy? To get off the train, to swear off trains entirely, to say, “What train?”

It didn’t occur to me until months later that these were all bands I loved in high school and college, before I met my husband, as if I were trying to remind myself of who I was before—the

I predated this shit, the music reminded me, and I would outlast it.

Woman who, let’s be real, probably won’t trust you. Woman who will try.

I wasn’t sad because I wanted to be married to him, I just couldn’t believe that all of it added up to… this? All of those years—gone. Poof.

I have poems that have accrued over eight, nine, ten years. Sometimes it feels like each poem I write is a draft of The Poem I’m trying to write—that singular, golden, impossibly definitive poem. The one poem I’m trying to live. Or the one life I’m trying to write. The mine.

I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.

Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible. I went to find beauty, and it was still there. I go looking for it, and it’s there.

“A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation. This isn’t the story of a woman who fell in love again and therefore was healed and lived happily ever after. This is the story of a woman coming home to herself.”

I think I could be a good partner in a different kind of partnership.

We agreed: “The deal” should be that both people get to be themselves and do their work. If I respected you and your work, I wouldn’t begrudge you the time and space it takes to do it. If you respected me and my work, you wouldn’t begrudge me the time and space to do it, either.

I have to trust this: If what I give my children is love, then they’re receiving it. If I seek to understand them, then they will feel understood. Embraced. Fathomed.

I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.

I could say what I want to say in two words, which are “Fuck resilience”—

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

There are so many images I can’t access now, stories I can’t tell and retell, because the person who was there isn’t here. He made himself disappear. How did he do that?

This is something I grieve: the severed tie to someone who knew me since college, the cokeeper of our memories, the person who could tell my kids what I was like during those years, the person who could tell me what I was like, the person I shared my life with. All of it, disposable.

Do those memories warp without their mirrors, without someone to reflect them, to keep them true, to show them their twin? Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another? Do we?

I could say that yes, it’s sometimes lonely doing it on my own. But feeling lonely when you’re with your partner is worse than being alone. Being with someone who doesn’t want the best for you is worse than being alone. I could say that when I think about my dream partner, what I want in that person is so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me—

The thing about birds: If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we’d believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song.

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

It’s as if I had lived under a spell, dazed by the falling snow and how it sparkled, unaware of the reality of my own life. But I did not call it a spell until it had been broken. I did not call it a spell—I called it marriage, family, life.

I feel so full of the life I had before—the life I have already lived—how is there room for anything new?

We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.

I have become an exile from my own history. —Rachel Cusk

“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.”

What do I do when a little piece from my old life floats to the surface and bobs there right in front of my face. Who do I tell? Who do I laugh with or sing along with?”

We both get everything and nothing at all, and that, I tell her, is the saddest damn thing.

I want you to know that it wasn’t all bad. We were a family once—first we were two, then three, then four. At one time there were forty things he loved about me. I’m a few years older now, so there would be a few more things. Except there aren’t. We’ve spent the last few years subtracting from that number.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. A text—like a letter, a poem, or story, a piece of art—exists in a historical, social, and political context. All you have to do is look at when it was created and ask yourself, What else was happening then?

Sometimes I need to hear the same thing in different words from different people, different sources, before I really hear it. The answer knocks on all the doors, tries all the windows, then slips in over the transom if it must.

inability to metabolize disappointment.

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it—and then what? Then the pain is yours. The pain is yours and it will change you.

You broke my mother’s heart, my father’s heart, my sisters’ hearts. I still hear from people I thought were “your people,” so I suppose they’re my people, too. Sometimes I still wear the perfume I wore on our wedding day, because I like it. I’ve never felt better. I’ve never felt worse. Your absence has made the life I have now possible. In which case, thank you. I didn’t ask for more pain, but I received it—you sent it—and it changed me. Thank you.

On my parents’ forty-eighth wedding anniversary, it struck me: forty-eight years is more than I have left to live. Even if I were to remarry, I would never be married for that long. I don’t have enough time. This is something else I mourn.

I wrote to Rhett about “the scraps”—the leftover bits of a life after the “real” life, the “real” relationship, is over. What do we do with the years we have left? How do we begin again in a sort of afterlife?

When I think of the torn-to-pieces-hood, I can’t help but think of the “multitudes” Walt Whitman celebrates in himself. Sometimes I’m weary of how torn and pieced and layered those multitudes feel, how fragmented and contradictory in ways that thrill me and scare me, but I want to celebrate them, too. Bringing the pieces together is part of that celebration.

What now? I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. But here’s the thing about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it. This flickering? It’s mine. This path is mine.

I remember something the poet Stanley Plumly said to me about poems: “They begin in the middle and they end in the middle, only later.”

Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life. —Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly