catherine-lacey

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.

She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.

Maybe misery begins everywhere.

It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.

Though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn't have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.

I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.

Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood__ne person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that_

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.

I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.

I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face__ot actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.

He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.

That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him__e were both unable to get near the real life in life.