The Details

by Ia Genberg

There was a deep-rooted sense of obedience in her, a kind of deference to the task at hand no matter how hopeless it might seem.

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

The kisses always landed where they did (on my lips) and never elsewhere in my life or on my attempts to create something.

That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called “self”: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Johanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not.

There were many ways to clean, and for my grandmother it was about dignity, about getting some of the luster from the homes in which she worked for herself; to me it was a question of adapting, of being able to slide in and slip past without notice.

I had the good luck of getting exactly what I’d asked for, the bad luck of getting everything I thought I wanted, the good luck and the bad luck of having my prayers about passionate love heard.

We had the entirety of the twentieth century behind us and an unknown millennium in front of us, an epic split, and still we gave ourselves to small things, corrupt feelings.

Our relationship was the length of a breath and yet he stayed with me, as if there was something in me that bent around him, a new paradigm for all my future verbs.

“Move on, sure,” she said, “but forgetting has never been your thing.”

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

I assume this is how a singular experience affects a person; the event gets encapsulated with the poison still intact, seeping, a slow command.

an anxiety that doesn’t wax and wane but endures in the form of a tension inside everything.

And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.

There is no one whole—“the whole is loose at the edges,” she noted in one interview—all we have are those fraying threads, flapping in the wind, and the complex ways they tie fast to each other.