In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

At the funeral, I was the only member of our immediate family who helped carry the casket. I was the only one tall enough. I had always been ashamed of my height; I wanted to be more petite, more like my sister, not long and angular like this. I could carry my father because I was more like him than I realised; I had been carrying a part of him all along.

Helena and I are very different people, three years and two oceans being the least of what separates us.

As a general rule, you couldn’t learn anything radically new, rate of progress capped from the start by inertia, inability to recognise anything past the limits of present imagination. You could only see, essentially, the world as you already knew it.

I questioned what else I had already missed so far, in my own life, simply through the limits of my character. If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders – as a general summation, it felt about right. Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something. Coming close then veering away again, sensing this unnameable category, music heard distantly through a series of doors, a dull, echoing bass, a sound hitting your body.

That’s what getting old is: catastrophic senescence. That’s what dying is. You become a parent. You fall into the stream.’

I didn’t like offering my feet; I always thought they were too big. Still a preoccupation the first time I undressed with someone, unfamiliar bodies trying to fix on each other.

Relationship as vacation, addendum to real life.

Everyone should be acknowledged. Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen. When that goes – even just a little way, through the doorway, the other side of the wall, even while you can still hear the movement taking place – it should be missed. It should be startling, when we travel, when we are there and then not there. Travelling is a reminder that every thought it is possible to conceive of exists on a material plane and that it is there and then not there and that fact is extraordinary, and unbearable.

The difference, when you get in at the end of the week, close the door behind you, put the keys on the worktop and take your shoes off and realise that the week’s completion entails only itself, that there is nothing after it, only yourself and the beginning of the next week and the one after, that all weeks forever are pressed into a seamless block, there is nothing outside of it, no relief in something shared, no brief escape or refuge – you realise that it’s gone.

Reproduction is quite a lot lower than official figures, you know? Who could blame them. But at the same time it’s sad, isn’t it; it’s awful. To decide, en masse, that we do not want more of this.’

Two hours sixteen minutes. I had lost 9lbs. The cleaners mopped it off the floor.

A thought travels 120 metres per second, and it isn’t enough.

The present, regardless of what it entails, almost always comes with an in-built inertia, a resolute, robust banality.

And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures for a period and exhibits a metabolic response?

So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.

Maybe the explanation is simpler. Maybe the algae, as we approach the heliopause, is expressing a form of regret, nostalgia: arcing backwards, turning itself towards Earth’s oceans, hydrotropic at 11 billion miles.

she never loved something so much as the moment it was gone.

family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.