the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never get near this man who is looking at you and living with you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened.
Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love—and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria—and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame—and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.
But my husband before he was Husband, being around him did, for a while, make me forget about my wildebeest. We walked around the city holding hands and we did a good deal of reflexive smiling and we often kissed and it felt like drugs that are too strong to legally exist outside of a body and there was that night the professor who became my husband smiled at me in the dark and I could see the pale white glow of his teeth and I thought there would never be anything better than seeing the pale white glow of his teeth through the dark on this night after we decided to get married and for at least a few minutes it made perfect sense and I believed that he had redeemed me and in a way he had and he did—but I don’t know why the wildebeests kept coming back, throwing all their angry weight around and making all those sweet, human, cracked-open, genuine, well-adjusted feelings go away, but they did go away—why did they go away?—I would like them not to go away and I would like to go back to being or feeling redeemed by him, by the white glow of his teeth in the dark, by our skin against each other— What are you thinking? he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, Oh, nothing, just how I love you , and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving—and I could be her—couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?
12
After Taupo and some cars, I got to Wellington and I got all the way to the ferry station and I stared at it. I remembered what someone said once about traveling, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn’t remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or
Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love—and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria—and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame—and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.
But my husband before he was Husband, being around him did, for a while, make me forget about my wildebeest. We walked around the city holding hands and we did a good deal of reflexive smiling and we often kissed and it felt like drugs that are too strong to legally exist outside of a body and there was that night the professor who became my husband smiled at me in the dark and I could see the pale white glow of his teeth and I thought there would never be anything better than seeing the pale white glow of his teeth through the dark on this night after we decided to get married and for at least a few minutes it made perfect sense and I believed that he had redeemed me and in a way he had and he did—but I don’t know why the wildebeests kept coming back, throwing all their angry weight around and making all those sweet, human, cracked-open, genuine, well-adjusted feelings go away, but they did go away—why did they go away?—I would like them not to go away and I would like to go back to being or feeling redeemed by him, by the white glow of his teeth in the dark, by our skin against each other— What are you thinking? he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, Oh, nothing, just how I love you , and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving—and I could be her—couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?
12
After Taupo and some cars, I got to Wellington and I got all the way to the ferry station and I stared at it. I remembered what someone said once about traveling, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn’t remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or
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