Archives

HAM SANDWICH, DRY by Caroljean Gavin

August 29, 2020

One day, in the middle of the week, a Wednesday or a Thursday, in the humid summer, with the air conditioner broken, and the ceiling fan so feeble, I fell asleep under my down alternative comforter and had a dream of walking through a lush field, thick blades of grass slithered against my legs, dandelions swung in the breeze, little hammocks for lazing bees, and when I woke up, covered in a loose sweat, I walked down the stairs step by step, blinking my eyes open, open and closed, flexing my fingers, balling my fists, and I went to the fridge, drew out some ham, folded it out gently over the white bread I just bought the day before, two loaves for the price of one at the Harris Teeter, and you know what, I didn’t have any tomatoes, or any lettuce, and guess what, I didn’t have any mayonnaise, so guess what, I just ate it like that, just dry, and guess what, that was completely bullshit, all of it, every word I just put down, complete bullshit. This is supposed to be nonfiction, and I’m supposed to tell the truth and only the truth so help me god, so help me, God, the truth is none of that happened, the truth is that I tried to write as boring an opening to this essay as I could think of so you wouldn’t make it this far, and the truth is I gave this the most boring title I could come up with so when you came to it, you would look at it and you would think to yourself, “Snore!” and your eye would jump to one of the other titles, surely, something with a big, bright, unusual noun would pop out to you, and you would be happy with that, and I would be safe, but the truth, the no-bullshit thing is I am never safe, even though I am really good at manipulating words, and saying things that are technically true, like when my husband asks me full of disbelief, “You don’t look at other men?” and I say no I don’t, and he fills in his own meaning, which is that I’m a weirdo, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about me cheating, and I don’t tell my secrets, I don’t tell them to myself, I don’t say, “No, that’s not why.” I flirt with the truth, “I don’t watch much porn, I don’t like watching men and women have sex,” when the truth is I like watching women have sex, and I don’t watch much porn, because women don’t have sex like that, because I want to see two women who are genuinely hot for each other, who fall all over and into each other, who don’t look up at a camera, and don’t lick their own lips and trace their long, sharp finger nails up their own naked thighs, and the truth is I want to see two women truly caught up in making love, in fucking, and the truth is I want to be one of those women, and the truth is I’m not straight, not even a little, even though I stand by the “I want to fuck Eddie Vedder” note I wrote to my friend sophomore year, and the truth is I’m out as bi, well kind of sort of, to some people, not really, and I know, I know I should claim myself, my identity, who I am, and I should probably leave my husband, even though I love him, and I should let my kids see me happy no matter who I’m with, but my own happiness has never in my life been the first happiness that matters, and I am not young anymore, and I am not cute anymore, and no woman would even want me anyway, so why tear up my family’s life like that just to be profoundly lonely on my own terms, and even all that isn’t true, because I started writing this so I could write, so I could finally tell the one secret I’ve been keeping my whole life, and I was going to get to it right away, but then I stopped myself, hey, there’s this other thing, it’s a pretty big secret, and it’s risky, my husband might read it, or his mom might see it, and other people might be angry at me, might think that I’m telling people that they don’t need to live their own truth, which is not what I’m saying at all, and I know you really are getting bored with me, and I know you really are getting tired of me, and believe me, believe me, I am trying to tell you, but my heart is racing, and my littlest kid is running around and he keeps digging his nails into my arm and hopping on the table and taking my fingers off my keyboard, and I think I’m going to cry, and I think I’m going to be sick and the thing is I know, that day, that summer day years and years and years and years ago, a day in the middle of the week, when that girl Melanie who lived in the same apartment complex as us came over, and there was a card table folded out in the middle of my room with a blanket over it, and we hid under it and pretended like we were camping, and she thought of a game which was to take off our pants and touch each other on our privates, and I know that as far as kids go, that happens, but the thing also was I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t like how it felt, and I didn’t like that we were hidden, that even in the moment I knew it was a secret I was going to keep all my life because it was meant to be, and I felt so much shame, I felt like all the people who touched my mom on her privates when she didn’t want them to, because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know my mom was molested by her father and brother and raped by boyfriends, and I knew this was a sex thing even at 5 or 6 and I was dirty, and that was what I was supposed to feel with sex stuff, and the thing is, and I didn’t even know that when I started writing this, but here it is, sex was not supposed to feel good, or pleasurable, so when I felt that way, later on, with men, again and again, I knew that was just the way it was, just the way it was supposed to be, and so I never really questioned my attraction to men, of course women aren’t attracted to men, that was the assumption I always went on, of course we’re not, because men are gross, and blank, and rough in the bad ways, no woman is really attracted to a man is what I thought, but they’re what we have, what we’re stuck with, so we say we have crushes on male celebrities that kind of look like girls or women our own age and when we’re older we wonder if straight people are drawn more to movie characters they identify with or those who they want to want to sleep with, and we remember the first time we saw Ghostbusters and Sigourney Weaver and we Google things like, “How to tell if I’m gay,” when the answer is, “If You’re Constantly Googling to See if You Might Be a Lesbian, guess what, YOU ARE A LESBIAN!” but I don’t like labels, and I’m not going to call myself a lesbian, I haven’t earned it, I haven’t earned identity, don’t you see, I let myself be swallowed, I make it happen. I can disappear so quickly I didn’t even realize I missed the mayonnaise until I finished the sandwich and a snack bag of salt and vinegar Lay’s and was so thirsty I had to drink two full glasses of water before I went back up to finish my nap.

THE MOON IS SAD by Kyra Baldwin

August 28, 2020

It’s raining in Seattle. I catch sight of my face in the drop-spattered glass of the bus stop. It’s lit by a phone-screen. The moon is out. It’s lit by a phone-screen. No one is texting either one of us.

See, the sun fucked the moon and the moon is sad now. The moon is already a depressive character because the moon is Vitamin-D deficient. The moon wanted to get a SAD lamp to remedy this, but the impassive physical laws of our universe said nuh-uh moon, because a SAD lamp in the sky would just look like another moon.

“There can’t be two moons,” they said.

“Why not? I’m loooonelyyyy,” replied the moon with comical sadness.

“Because we’ve already set the gravitational pull of Earth to just One Moon.”

“Mars has two moons.”

“Well, you’re not Mars.”

“Jupiter has sixty-seven.”

The laws shrugged.

“Does either Jupiter or Mars have life?”

“No.”

“Nobody gets everything, Moon.”

And the impassive laws of the universe walked away, except they also stayed exactly there and didn’t change at all.

“But I don’t even get to experience life. Earth gets all the life,” sighed the Moon into the black void. There was no one to talk to.

Moon would talk to the stars, but the stars are all friends with the Sun. And Moon fucked the Sun and now they ignore each other. It happened just last year, in that odd 4 a.m. hour where the Moon and the Sun are equals in the sky. After billions of years, Sun looked at Moon in its harvest gown and thought Moon looks pretty good right now. And so the Sun fucked the Moon and came shooting stars. Ew. Sun made Moon laugh by describing what earth is like during the day. “Sweaty.”

The next day at 4 a.m., Moon waited restlessly for Sun to come back. So many people had already loved Moon and left (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmitt). Moon didn’t think it could take losing any more love. But when morning came up over Australia, Sun wouldn’t even look at Moon. Sun ignored Moon and just stared out at Sagittarius A. It wanted something bigger and sadder than Moon could ever be.

So that’s how the Moon and I got to talking. Moon said we look alike because my face is round and doleful too. I told Moon that it’d be really cool to control oceans and menstrual cycles. Moon shrugged and said it’d be cool to go in an ocean and have a menstrual cycle.

VEGAS by Mackenzie Moore

August 27, 2020

I shudder, feeling the heat as I approach the straightaway where all you see are the shells of casinos looming. Blink-182 cranking, asking me what my age was, again. I keep ticking past billboards that tell me when the buffets will return. I jam my foot down on the accelerator. Tempt fate with out-of-state plates.

I think about five months earlier when we peeled away, me from the curb at Terminal 2, and him off to the Mirage for the weekend. It feels like years. I-15 north is an unavoidable corridor, but I hadn’t considered that I’d get a visual reminder of how much we’d splintered in a couple dozen axial rotations. How it doesn’t take a flight, or a drive, or much at all. You can survive thousands of miles apart and months on the road, only for it to blow up in your face less than a mile from home. Tell Zoom to use that as their marketing hook.

The wheeze of a beige Super Duty trying to edge me out of the left lane would piss me off, usually—it would underscore how tiny my car is, and that in it, I’m basically flyswatter bait on the freeway. But the growling hum at the bumper just feels like another twitch, or tremble, like the ones radiating up through my floorboards back in LA. You know, like when the downstairs neighbor turns the air conditioner from dehumidify to cool. A nuance so distinctive you’d bet your paycheck on it. When I merged out of LAX those months ago, the transmission seized immediately, the tach shot to 4. I should have known, because just like the floorboards, it’s hard to deny when the Earth shudders, but why linger on some small roll indicating a piece of life is about to go sliding out the door.

***

When you stay long enough, you become salaried on estimating limits, knowing where the plateau levels off matters; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Because sticking your thumb on the exact moment of how long someone can drive without getting drowsy, or how long you can wander on foot before devolving into hungry-tired bickering matters. It means you’re really fucking great at anticipating, at predicting patterns, at working within reason.

But approximation is an art. Science dictates you’ll only go so far, so fast on medium grade gas. You’ll keep moving, sure, even if you skimp on maintenance. Thing is, the little corroded pockets will keep digging deeper, and only later—maybe once you’ve finally started to spring for premium when you’re deep in airport traffic, or alone in the Mojave desert, will the shudders come.

And maybe with 1,000 miles to go, hearing the low reverberations that confirm something was wrong, you’ll finally pay attention to the low roll, preparing you for when the tectonic plates start shifting.

HIGHWAY 25 by Lindsey Heatherly

August 26, 2020

I remember that night we parked at the drive-in on Highway 25 and steamed up the windows before static on the AM station switched over to previews. Previews came before a raunchy, college-age comedy, alternating between raindrop rivers and lip-locked intermissions that cut through windshield fog. Foggy windows were smeared by my gray cotton jacket through your steady hand. The hand that sat on my knee during a panic attack on the drive back. The drive through dark and rain and a flooded road too immersed for good traction on those too-old tires. Tires that skidded across water when you asked if I was okay and I just nodded my head. The head that bowed under the awning to get inside, when we stripped each other of soaked clothing, and I straddled your lap with my legs. We took laps around our troubles–the anniversary of your mom’s death passing quietly with brute force, the burdens of raising two boys alone, and my cycles of manic depression–and I told you I loved you and I was sorry it was a tough night, tough year. Tough tears you’d deny when your eyes welled up and so did mine, and we had the best sex we’d ever had on that couch while the rain just poured and poured. Words poured through your salt and pepper beard piercing my paper skin, leaving red welts I wish I could have peeled off and saved for now when I wonder if you still make the drive to work down Highway 25 or if you finally gave them the middle finger and found something better. Found someone better.

I AM NOT AN ACTRESS by Ashley Jeffalone

August 25, 2020

The man who will later steal from me is directing a short film. Today, in this moment, we’re still friends, so I pick up when he calls.

On the grounds of his apartment complex, he leads me to a Bradford pear tree, puts me underneath, and I kneel along the roots to thieve shards of glass from the green. There are other people with us, laden with cameras and lights, and they lean over me, commit my idling to film. They come close enough for me to remember their sugared breath but not their faces, not their voices—I've lost years to forgetting, and their heads are smooth and eyeless. I don't remember the mouths. My friend tells me to look off to the pond, just north, and my eyes meet the sun, and he says Smile, like you’re hearing a joke. And he’s not taken anything from me yet, so I nip the bottom of my lip. I beam. It takes effort—the tree's blossoms smell of rot.

My friend knows plenty of actresses. I'm a sociology major, not an actress, but he knows this too. I haven’t done anything like this since I was in Honors Drama, an eleven-year-old in a newsboy cap, the kind I thought thespians wore, a marker of my sincerity. My last performance was a play of sneering and stomping, my costume a black miniskirt that I let drift high across my thighs. I thought I could be sexy at eleven. I thought it could be part of my act. But I quit Drama when the pupils of other people began to petrify me, when I traded wanting to be watched for doing the watching, and after my friend wraps his shoot, I’ll never perform in this capacity again. I’m not counting the show I’ll put on for him later, to convince him that I'm unchanged after what he took. I won’t count the number of times I’ll pretend to remember anything about the dolor that will come after.

We take the afternoon to film it, my friend's wordless, plotless, montage-y thing. We want to do it in one go. My friend yanks us all from the sunshine and deposits us into his apartment, where his DVDs are strewn in a predictable mess and sweat sours the draft from his window. In the bedroom, I don a button-down, rumple it like believable sleepwear, and let them film me like that. When he gives the command, I burrow into my friend’s bed. Look confused, he says, look unsure. I find that, despite how often I feel those things, I’m not good at miming either. I mash my hands against my eyes. Squint when I rest my arms. The blankets smell like spirits and old cologne on skin, and later, when my friend steals from me, that smell will stay with me, on me, for months. I don’t know this yet. I take hard swallows of air so the camera sees I’m distressed. Someone laughs and I snap I’m not an actress. I’m giving it my best shot.

We finish in his living room, where my friend sits me on his couch. He frames me in daylight, which is risky, but worth it, he says. He calls over a man of the faceless crew, who steps into the threshold of my memory and gains an identity: scene partner. Fellow actor. Something good. I like him without trying, this man who settles beside me to murmur one-liners. I've hardly begun to laugh when my friend shoots me a look. You're breaking up in this scene. Say shitty things to each other. Improvise. It nearly sounds like pleading. I take my eyes from the man next to me, looking somewhere past the camera. I think of my mom, scorn on her mouth as she breaks dishes. I think of my dad, his knuckles, his smile. The camera rolls.

We begin, us strangers, to argue. We ad lib like we're lovers.

Him: "What the fuck were you thinking? Do you ever fucking think?"

Me: “I knew you didn’t listen. I hate you."

Him: “You’re wasting our lives. You’re wasting mine.”

Me: “Put your hands on me. What are you afraid of?”

This is what people say to each other, I know.

Parts of me begin to hurt: my arms from brandishing. My throat from constricting. My face from grinning. My friend tells me to smile less, that no one looks like that when they're mad, but every time the camera begins its capture, I laugh as I scream. My scene partner rises from the couch with each cut, leaning over me to shout. Spit on my face. Spit on my bared teeth. All the lightness from before is siphoned out by our clamor.

The room's grown so quiet. I don't know if they're still filming. There is only me and my paper tongue, my scene partner with his mouth like my mom's, his knuckles like my dad's. Perhaps, says my friend, we’ve forgotten this was acting. We've become servants to the moment, agents of emotion. My Drama teacher used to say that instants like these were the point.

Later, when the cameras make their exits and my scene partner is sent away, when my friend has robbed me blind and plied me with coffee to apologize, he'll say something similar: there wasn't much he could have done differently, really, when he was so caught up in the moment. The moment entrenched him in its webs, shackled him to its demands, and for years I’ll wonder if this is the cost of having something worth taking.

All I had wanted was to act one more time. How I longed for cameras to have been on us then.

DEAR ALISON by Stephanie Parent

August 24, 2020

I’ve used you so many times. In college application essays, you were the tragedy I experienced early in life, the loss that made me wise beyond my years and allowed books to speak to me so deeply I was determined to become a writer myself.

(I wasn’t wise beyond my years, and I never wanted to write as much as I wanted to read.)

I recycled those same essays for graduate school applications, but when I actually made it to a master’s program and depression snuck up on me like a springtime drizzle, then slammed down all at once in a summer thunderstorm, there you were again: you were the explanation for all my psychological deficiencies. Who wouldn’t believe the world was an unsafe place, a gauntlet they weren’t strong enough to handle, after someone so important had died when they were only three years old?

I kept on using you, all throughout my twenties, in and out of therapy and half-formed career goals and dead-end jobs. You were the reason I couldn’t be a responsible adult, couldn’t make something of myself. I had spent the first two decades of my life trying to please my parents, to make up for your death, to keep them from worrying about me. I was always ahead on homework and ready for every test, never chugged a beer or smoked a joint. Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. I had to run out of steam eventually, right?

Now, in my thirties, I’m still using you. You’re the ghost haunting my every decision, my every regret with your stale, back-of-the-closet smell. I’m wringing you out like an old washcloth, the one I used to mop up the mess of my subconscious. I’m eking out every musty drop in the hopes you’ll yield emotional resonance. Or at the very least, provide some justification for the stupid choices I made. For all the money I spent, the good jobs I stopped looking for, the resumes so half-assed I might as well have ripped them up and let the pieces float off like tumbleweeds.

I really am a shitty sister, aren’t I? For someone who lived less than two months, who never developed a personality, someone who was born when I was too young to remember you, I certainly have put a lot of pressure on you. How much worse would it be if you had lived?

(Hey, I said I was shitty.)

I’m angry with you for coming to our world so briefly, arriving with the first soft snow flurries of December, and melting away before spring could even arrive. I’m angry you left me with the knowledge of how fragile life is, and how people can go on living with a part of their souls tucked away behind the winter coats. I’m angry at my parents for never talking about you. Maybe if there had been a funeral I could remember, a grave I could visit, a picture on a wall, I wouldn’t have to carry you inside me like a thousand buttercups that never opened, yellow hearts that withered on some March morning when the frost returned.

You died because you stopped breathing, when you were six weeks old, a few months after I turned three.

I’m not sure I ever learned how to breathe.

SITTING ALONE by D.T. ROBBINS

August 23, 2020

I had a dream about you. I sat in a pew that only had enough room for two people. Its red velvet had faded, its wooden frame splintered.

Someone played piano, sang a song for you, about you. The congregation sent up a crescendo of angel voices, enveloping the atmosphere, like a child wrapped around her father’s leg.

And me? I lost it. I bawled, wailed.

I’d saved that seat next to me for you, but you never came.

The dream-song, a melody I’d never heard before, stayed in my ears after I woke. I considered whether or not to remove the guitar from my wall, excavating the song’s chord structure from my sleep. The tears I wept, hollow-chested and heavy-limbed, cascaded into reality, like watching the ripped remains of matter spewing from the other side of a black hole. Because the truth is, I fucking miss you.

You were the whole of my youth, my adolescence. I would pray like you said to, you would stir my soul with mystery and revelation, wisdom and understanding. The elders prayed over me at 13. Never look to man, they said, because man would always disappoint me. Keep my eyes on you and you alone. They said the devil would shoot fiery arrows at me my whole life, but you’d protect me.

And the devil did speak. From pulpits he decried the extent of your grace and compassion. And I, if I truly believed, was to revile and denounce so-called abominations that the world fell victim to. Despite your freedom, I put on chains. He criticized the expectation of your power and presence. Miracles became blasphemous. Mystery was ignorance. You were the light, but I only saw darkness.

He spoke from behind the desks of those who said they knew you better, were closer to you. As if my relationship with you was a thing to be measured and scrutinized like the subject of a clinical trial. Charisma was favored over personal experience. Could I preach a three-point sermon? Was the inflection in my voice enough to evoke an emotional response? How many bodies could I bring into the room? When was the last time I jerked off? Who was I fantasizing about? Did I touch her before she wore a ring? Was I drinking in public or at home? Did I cause someone to stumble with my secret sins?

My questioning and challenging their teaching, the methodology, blacklisted me. It seems as though you’re a flash in the pan, they told me. This isn’t working out, they said. You’re not a strong enough spiritual leader, she said. Whatever the hell that even meant.

The devil’s voice grew louder, silencing yours. I quit listening to you both. I chose my own voice. Of my anger, my disappointment and disillusionment. You became a distant memory, a nightmare, a gravesite.

I watched as those who believed they knew you better ended up knowing nothing of you and even less of themselves. Their egos crucified their missions. They vacated their callings, falling from their pedestals. Some by choice, others by force. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t find some restitution in it. One friend, who stood witness to my eventual dismissal of faith, said to me, You were the one they said would go nowhere and do nothing, look where you’re at now, how well you’re doing! And where the fuck are they? Their names are forgotten, reputations buried. Maybe I’m wrong for that. Maybe you reap what you sow. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

But now I can’t shake that song, that dream. I keep seeing that seat I saved for you. I keep wondering if you’ll show. If you’ll remember me like I remember you from the days of my innocence. If you’ll remember my innocence at all. If you’ll remember my voice the way I remember yours. Or if it’s too late. If I’ve become like that pew, faded and splintered.

The seat belongs to you and, whether I like it or not, no one else is capable of occupying that space.

I’ve been sitting here for so long.

I hate sitting alone.

ILLUMINATION by Audra Kerr Brown

August 22, 2020

Three weeks after her miscarriage, Guinevere fell in love with the lightbulb. A 40-watt incandescent globe from the dining room wall sconce. She removed the lampshade in order to stare at the glow of its tungsten filaments, the bare harp sitting above the bulb as a halo.

You are beautiful, Guinevere would say. Absolutely beautiful.

The light had an electrical heartbeat, a faint buzzing, as if bees were trapped inside.

She liked to unscrew the bulb from its socket, marvel at how perfectly it fit in her palm. How warm it felt. How round, how small.

OBIT by Jesse Salvo

August 21, 2020

Published Wed, Jan 13, 11:53 p.m. ET

Jersey City, NJ

This item is dedicated to the living memory of David Graff, a friend of this paper, who passed away this week in a manner very much unexpected to those who knew him well. David, who died Thursday, was born in Michigan to a family of middle income, attended the University of Chicago under dubious circumstances, failed out under less dubious ones, spent two years writing grants for legal nonprofits, discovered no dignity in the work, detested labor, detested snobbery, moved back to Detroit, fell in love, became engaged, took a job cleaning churches, saw the engagement end badly, saw his only love end badly, quit the churches, bought an outbound ticket, spent nearly five years living reckless across the ocean, did steady, unlucrative work in Morocco, bought a dog, gained a small reputation and a byline, broke his foot in Cambodia, got in over his head, saw a child dismembered by a landmine, acted badly and was jailed in Chile, elected finally to come home, took a job in Sioux City, detested phoniness, detested “small talk”, got a girl pregnant, paid for the abortion, buried the dog, quit drinking, broke three stories, learned to live with regret, moved to a major national publication, lived comfortably for two years, disdained politeness, disdained bosses, was bought out and left the paper, was hired and bought out again, cobbled together a National Magazine Award and a mortgage, had a heart attack, pivoted briefly to video, relapsed a year and got sober again, was contacted by and met with the abortion he’d thought he’d helped pay for, moved to New York City for work, got laid off again, sold the mortgage at a loss, reached out to his life’s only love, garnered no response, caught a job with a small paper writing obituaries, always was a joyful presence around the office, never was a burden to anyone, proved unable to shake a childhood loneliness, retired to his apartment one evening, wrote a small note in the parlance of his trade, drank a bottle of bleach sometime just before midnight, sat very still in his chair, thought briefly of all the words we use to explain a life, attained a sort of peace, and regretted only the bad parts.

WHEN THE FIRST HUSBAND DIES YOUNG by Dan Brotzel

August 20, 2020

When your first husband dies young, you feel shock, you feel sick. You hurt, you bruise, you ache, you sting. You feel nothing at all but also everything, way too much. Reality has been swept from under you. There’s a big hole, a gap, where your life should be. Nothing makes sense. You’re trapped in a nightmare that can’t possibly be yours. Everything is panic, anxiety.

You keep running up against the hope that this is all an illusion, that soon you’ll be able to get your head round it, feel differently about it, send it away. You keep thinking you’re in a bad dream, or maybe even just a dream of a dream of a bad dream. You tell yourself you’ll unravel it all eventually and get back to normal.

When the first husband dies young, you feel like your future’s been stolen. You feel like you’ve entered on a chapter that wasn’t even supposed to be there in your book. You had a life, you had a roadmap, you had dreams. You had a sense of where things might go, a direction of travel. You had the shared destiny of each other.

He painted pictures of the future. He had it all scoped out. The vision–a lot of it came from him. But you went along with it. There was a certain muscularity to his mapping out of things. You liked this, at first. It involved you and only you, it made you feel that you’d been specially selected. You were part of a plan. You existed for something, for someone. Now he is gone, and you’re not sure where you are either.

When the first husband dies young, you notice how keen everyone else is to grieve on your behalf. From the outside it’s a story they can really get their heads around, a formulaic film plot: love’s young dream crushed, the brave one taken too young, a future stolen. To them, it all seems so clear, what’s happened and how bad it all is, where it all begins and ends. Whereas for you, it’s just a mess, it’s not even a feeling, it’s just a color that’s drained from the world. You wouldn’t even know where to start, how to define it, what box to put it in. You are the box.

People seem so taken with the exquisite agony of it all, they keep telling you how they feel your pain. But how can you? you think. I don’t even know how to feel it myself.

When the first husband dies young, you find that people have a part for you to play: the inconsolable young widow. And they want you to play it forever. They love it. They want you to wear black–well not literally, at least not all of them. They want you to turn your existence into a living shrine. They want you to relate everything you say to some cherished moment with him. They want your every action to have meaning only when held up against the lens of his tragedy, your tragedy.

They like you tragic, they like the look.

When the first husband dies young, you’re not thinking about moving on. But slowly you start to see that you’re suspended now in a solution of suffering, floating like a dissected rabbit in a formaldehyde tank for the world to pity. It’s a fate worse than death, you hear yourself think. Maybe you don’t want to be anything else right now, but you’d like to know you could try if you wanted. Otherwise you might as well be dead too.

When the first husband dies young, you quickly realize that you can never really say anything to anyone to suggest that things were ever less than perfect. Yet there are little things you start to remember, little niggles and judgments and tensions and frictions, things you don’t have in your life now.

Sometimes, when in-laws or relatives or friends of the deceased sing the praises of your late husband, you don’t quite recognize him. Or, when they call to mind a famous evening or memorable event with him, you recall something extra that they never saw: the row you had before the party, the resentment you carried all night, the savage alcoholic catch in his voice, the sullen resentful slurs, the punitive silences–yours and his–on the drive home. So now you have to nod and smile past your memory, as everyone looks to you to validate theirs.

When the first husband dies young, you find you can put clothes on and not have to wait for the inevitable assessment of your outfit. You can make a spontaneous plan to see someone that evening and not have to explain who they are and how you know them, or what time you’ll be back. You can do nothing–you don’t even have to say that you don’t feel like doing anything–you can just not do anything. You can mooch, you can putter, you can forget to get dressed or do your hair. You can browse Netflix or arrange your wardrobe or read a book or flick through some crappy celeb mag or plant some herbs out on the balcony or spend three hours making an onion soup, with some disposable plastic pop turned up loud that he would have hated.

There are occasions, on your own, never to be said to anyone else, in the darkest corners of the night or the quietest folds of a solitary day, when you dare to think that you prefer it like this.

When the first husband dies young, you realize he didn’t like you very much. It’s not really his fault; he probably didn't like himself very much either. (His dad was no different.) He was, to use a phrase that he loved, “a man of the world,” whereas, you–poor sweet, dear you–you were so naive and hopeless that you needed saving from yourself. You had to have things explained to you, he explained–which was handy, because he liked nothing more than to explain things. He knew stuff, he was clever, and he was capable in many ways. But there was a price.

He liked everything his way. He knew what was best for you, much better than you ever could. He expected your tastes to be his tastes. He expected you to defer to him in the big decisions–he didn’t want you to go back to college, didn’t want you to carry on with that job, let alone go for that promotion. He was happy to go along with you being you, so far as that didn’t conflict with you being his. But he wasn’t really very kind and, contrary to all his assumptions, he wasn’t very funny.

You realize that you were afraid of him. You thank God that you never had any kids.

When the first husband dies young, you blame yourself. You survived him, and now–with no right of reply–you judge him. But you know you never wished him dead; you had this silly optimistic belief that everything would right itself in the end, that you would both find a way back to the early days when everything was perfect and hopeful.

When the first husband dies young, you find one day you are free to think your own thoughts and free to stop worrying about how others expect you to be. And you see at last your first husband’s great gift to you: the realization that there need never be a second.