#private rites

The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.

Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterwards, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half-asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.

"There are, Irene has always felt, few frustrations to match that of being read a certain way by family members. To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling's approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things that happened to be true at the age of seventeen. Irene, then, at the age of seventeen: first blond, then a crispier, bleach-fried blond, self-consciously furious in every direction and seldom polite enough to let anyone reach the end of a sentence before starting one herself. An Irene who, to this day, lingers like a supplementary presence, superimposed over the top of the current version, making her harder to see. Well, Isla will say, affecting the older-sister voice that implies an age gap of decades rather than barely a year, you've always been political, you get upset, you never let anyone speak. Will turn to her wife, Morven, and say, Irene's spiky, she's always been spiky. You have to watch what you say, as though Irene is not in fact in the room. (Morven, an anthropologist turned office worker, will nod along as though this makes perfect sense, as though it's not a ridiculous thing to do to someone, nailing them down forever to one particular scrap of floor.) The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again. Too hard to explain to her sister that she does know how to listen, that she's too old or too spent to be angry all the time."

finished private rites btw