Activity

Later it became clear—The Reason had the right to explain my feelings to me because he’d spent six years telling me what I felt and who I was, and had quite often been correct. Usually the version of myself he sold me on was more positive than the one I’d previously held. He believed me to be smart…

Everyone told me that everyone was breaking up or breaking down or breaking through those days—these days, these days, everyone said—something in the ether, it seemed, was pushing them all to the edges of whatever they were in. The pandemic was entering year three, and a friend’s paranoid delusions…

Edie had often joked when they were together that she was getting a PhD in Him—that he’d told her what to think, what to read, what and whom to give her attention, the qualities that made art worthwhile, the qualities that made life worthwhile. And she had, she knew, benefited from his education. S…

Edie tries to remember for a minute, then all at once she does—I asked him why suffering existed, and he told me he had chosen to suffer.

But that didn’t answer your question, Marie interrupts, but Edie keeps on.

And I asked him why he had chosen to suffer, and he said that all life required …

She had not really liked either boy, but instead felt confused about her position, in each of their lives, as a desired object. She stayed up late at night trying to pray, trying to address, in the divine gaze of God, her fear that human-on-human love was really the root of all suffering, all malai…