The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

enough money, in a system that screws you at every turn. If I talk about insurance I don’t have to think about death, except usefully. I am usefully in love, and I love being useful. I want nice, I want ‘yes’. I want to die now, all the time, and also in her arms.

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.

I spoon it into myself, waiting to feel something – the way, when I came home from school, it all came pouring out of me: the girl said, the boy said, my scraped knee, the teacher, my horrible friend. But there is nothing to say. There is nothing to pour.

The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly – our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons. Am I wrong? I look it up and find that our eyes eat photons, absorb them. Our eyes make images by destroying light. Like black holes. Jesus, I think. There’s nothing to say to that.

The world has turned into the place where people get hurt, where the man I love will one day die. Everything speaks to me of his safety, his proximity – time is a mechanism to measure how long we are apart. It’s not that I think about him constantly, he is my way of thinking. His mind is my compass, his eyes my only mirror.