i'm god's mary sue

I'd sit on the carpet in my bedroom, smoking in silence as I waited for her to leave her room, transformed into a woman who fit in. Suddenly, the chasm between my reality and hers would become painfully apparent. Then, as if she didn't want me to see her in such a state, she'd slip out the door.

I saw myself in the glass, in my mourning-dress, a faded, hollow-eyed vision. Yet I thought little of the wan spectacle. The blight, I believed, was chiefly external: I still felt life at life's sources.

I don't care if we never fuck again. I just want to watch her ascent and disintegration, because anything burning that bright one day must consume itself and float away, an ash, and no one has the power to stop it. It's flirting with disaster to love someone that much, someone who's always on the brink of going away. I know she doesn't need saving, but I dream of saving her, of rolling a rock up the mountain and being flattened by it as it rolls back over me all the way to the bottom again. And then I push it right back to the top, because if it takes this much sweat it must be worth it.

Mom was almost never at home at the time. She was into her jellyfish phase, and she used to spend all day at the invertebrate tank in the city aquarium, where she would sit, clutching her old Gucci handbag, watching kurage (水母 — jellyfish; lit. "water" + "mother") through the glass. I know this because she took me there once. It was the only thing that relaxed her. She had read somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read that same article, so it was always crowded in front of the tank, and the aquarium had to set out folding chairs, and you had to get there really early in order to get a good spot, all of which was very stressful. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure she was having a nervous breakdown at the time, but I remember how pale and beautiful she looked with her delicate profile against the watery blue tank, and her bloodshot eyes following the drift of the pink and yellow jellyfish as they floated by like pulsing pastel-colored moons, trailing their long tentacles behind them.

This is what Felice meant about painting—in her mind, O'Keeffe's paintings of clouds were what clouds looked like—and when she looked out of the airplane and the clouds arranged themselves in ways that recalled the cloud paintings, she realized she had substituted the image for the experience in her mind. Nevertheless, the thing you couldn't put in a painting was still the air—the wind feathery against their bodies when they sat in Rebecca's garden looking at the morning glories or the stale air in an airplane cabin, full of coughs, sighs, and shallow breaths.

Knaydle is round and wet but chewy. If the moon were butch, she'd be Knaydle—busy trying to define the horizon, self-important, patching together fog in order to hide her sentimentality but steady for all that, comforting as she moves across your sky.

Now she's an ordinary forty-seven-year-old lesbian. She bleeds—on the day she bleeds the most, she is remote and inclined to change her daily habits. She drives through Oakland, bleeding in the heat, a week past solstice. She longs for her lover, and her longing is easily satisfied. She can interrupt her work and they'll have lunch for an hour. She can choose an unusual route and watch the houses waver in the heat then come into focus—each particular house, each separate life, a whole city, where she lives, an escaped mental patient, with only her little part of the common life. By now, no one would know to look for her.

...the history of the family was a machine of unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irredeemable wearing of the axle.