Suzanne Finnamore

I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child," I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?" I ask."Keep going," Christian says. "Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.

So many events and moments that seemed insignificant add up. I remember how for the last Valentine´s Day, N gave flowers but no card. In restaurants, he looked off into the middle distance while my hand would creep across the table to hold his. He would always let go first. I realize I can´t remember his last spontaneous gesture of affection.

I remember one desolate Sunday night, wondering: Is this how I´m going to spend the rest of my life? Marrid to someone who is perpetually distracted and somewhat wistful, as though a marvelous party is going on in the next room, which but for me he could be attending?

I used to loathe ambivalence now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord's Prayer in German to horrified dinner guests. One of those parents who tell people who aren't interested and haven't askd what their progeny's grade-point average is, what school they go to, how handsome and brilliant and psychic they are. If something goes awry and I do become one of those parents, you have my permission to sneak into my bedroom while I am sleeping and pinch my nostrils shut.

You are the closest I will ever come to magic.

When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.

I said that additionally, since I was planning to nurse, it be best if you were off the breast before I came back to work. My boss just looked at me dreamily and said, 'That won't be for sixty years, at least.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

It__ adult swim time and I__ diving in here at the shallow end.

Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

I've felt basically lucky ever since, almost every day of my life. That's something else love should make you feel. It should make you fell fortunate.It will be made clear to you in a stray gesture, the line of a throat. Something in the hands. There may or may not be any music playing. But there will be a certain velocity of the spirit, a sensation of dropping through clear space unimpeded, and you think, This is the one. I found you.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.