χάρις

But then, uncontained emotion is always distressing to be around, isn’t it?

So that they might remember, we must forget

The women had a story to tell, even if the world wasn’t quite yet ready to hear it, and their story began with three simple words. We were there.

They all spent their lives in plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

I will make my own anthology

Before Buffalo, I had never heard the phrase “environmental liens.” I was at an art department gathering, standing around with Matt’s new colleagues in a grain silo that had been turned into an event space. Onstage, an artist with bedazzled lips shimmied in front of screen playing clips of a “We Buy Houses” seminar. As darkness fell in the concrete chamber, we could see only rhinestones, crusting a wolfish smile. At the bar, people were advising Matt on the problems of trying to find a raw space for a studio. Lead paint, leaking roofs. You know, some of these old gas stations and industrial buildings, you have to make sure they don’t have a tank buried, that they don’t have any environmental liens. It was real estate language for the cost of finding unfinished toxic cleanups-but said so casually that I caught myself nodding. As if it were common sense to think of pollution as an unpaid debt, a creditor about to repossess the house.

Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.

Yet I couldn't rid myself of the sense that if I stopped moving, the merry-go-round called our family would simply cease to rotate. If I stopped moving, then I wouldn't be loved. And if I was the one moving, then I had no proof that I was loved. What did it mean to be loved, in any case? Was it to be needed?

In another universe, I meet my mother when she is a child. We go for a walk at the seaside and she tells me all the things she loves about the world. We share a hundred jokes and she laughs so easily, without a single worry. I want to meet that version of her. Wide eyed and full of joy. Easy laughter and carefree. Before the same world she loved so deeply broke her heart.

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

“There is another world, but it is in this one,” says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats that I kept tacked to my wall for years. That was the world I wanted to see.