Sentience

Our focus might seem narrow but we find joy in obsessing over the details.

But marriage is vast and mysterious and private. You could not scientifically compare two marriages for all of the variance of factors, most particularly what two specific people can tolerate.

She was grateful he was bathing the boy, though during said bath he had asked that she put the boy's towel in the dryer to warm it, that she bring in a piece of toast for the boy to eat, that she fetch the boy's pajamas from his room, all as the man sat on the closed lid of the toilet, next to the tub, reading something on his phone. Sure, she would do these things, even though all week she had done them herself, without even the option of help, and wouldn't it seem petty to point this out?

So she actively resisted making friends in a mom context and objected to the sort of clapping and cooing that went on in the library room, the floor play that would be mandatory, the group peekaboos and collective itsy-bitsy-spidering, the happiness and positivity that would also be mandatory. It was a veritable embrace of All Things Mommy, and the mother certainly did not want to embrace anything of the sort: she was indeed a mother, but she wasn't that kind of mother, the sort that built her entire life and being around her child, who filled her days with baby groups and baby activities and fully submerged herself in the mommy current, moving through her days and weeks according to library schedules and civic events, texting about splash pads and jungle gyms, sharing warnings about ticks, about pesticides on fruits and vegeta bles. But there they were. She saw them through the windows framing the door. Those mommies. Those happy mommies.

We could have counted our problems on the petals of the daisy in my bouquet, but it wouldn’t be long before we were lost in a field of them.

But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.

The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon.

You need short term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long term optimism.

As if we could ever properly articulate what it means to breathe in the particular scent of your child, to listen as they laugh in their sleep, to feel the guilt of wanting them to leave us alone even as we yearn for them to never leave us at all.

It was a joke I had once laughed at, until it stopped being funny, the way so many things do when love walks out and bitterness takes its place.

An interior life of dreams and wishes.

You can’t see the road ahead, and so all you feel is the loss of the road already travelled.

Fake freedom puts us on the treadmill toward chasing more, whereas real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less.