my expanding body limned by the spectral outline of a prior, skeletal self
If writing was my great love—and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man would ever be—I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison. Maybe submitting myself to another’s needs—becoming a wife, and then a mother—was precisely the antivenom I needed.
In my early twenties, the first time I moved to the city, I worked as a temp in a Midtown office building, passing my days in a grim cubicle, on a floor without windows, running database searches on high-asset clients to make sure they didn’t have criminal records. At the holiday party I got sloppy…
By the time our daughter arrived, we’d already been in couples therapy for three years, all but the first year of our relationship. Once a week, we went to a basement office and sat together on a loveseat that never felt large enough. The harder our home life got, the more guilty I felt for wanting…
Four years in, it hurt to hold the things I loved about C alongside everything that had soured between us. But these things stubbornly remained: His wit. His loyalty. His belly laugh. His razor vision. One of my favorite things about being married to C was the company of his gaze. The things he not…
