AFTER READING “MOCK ORANGE”

Already, it was so:
the scent of orange blossoms
at the window, sun-jostled, bearing

the sting of the finite.
I thought of birds in those branches
as jewels, hard, refracting

light onto our walls, and knew
whatever gleaming they may have done
was not for us.

Knowledge came
disguised in sweetness
and with such ease, it astonished.

We knew, eventually, we would want
different things. Then
we started wanting them.

FIRST FALL

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.

Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.

Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match.

Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived?

I don’t know. That’s the truth.

GOOD BONES

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

[...] meanwhile, what would I be doing for work? Reading poems, teaching workshops, going to dinners, giving talks, being interviewed in front of an audience? Maybe for business it sure sounded a lot like pleasure?

Once, while I was at a literary festival in Spokane, my husband called from Ohio: I needed to come home right away. Rhett had a fever. I wouldn’t have made this call to him if he’d been traveling for business. I wouldn’t have expected him to cancel work engagements and fly home across the country because of a fever. If I needed help with the kids, I would have called my parents, my sisters, my friends. By the time I got home, my son was fine. His fever was gone, but the house was hot with anger.

Remember, I asked you to dog-ear this earlier: We became friends in a creative writing workshop. When I got good news related to my writing—a publication, a grant, an invitation—I sensed him wince inwardly. So I stopped sharing good news. I made myself small, folded myself up origami tight. I canceled or declined upcoming events: See, I’ll do anything to make this marriage work. I gave up income and professional opportunities, but those sacrifices didn’t save my marriage.

We were both busy, probably spread too thin, needing things from our lives—and from one another—that we weren’t getting. I agreed that something needed to give. I disagreed that the something needed to be my work. In turn, me.

What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.

The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use?

To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connections on their own. When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross. I can’t carry you from one to the other. I can’t carry you from the nesting doll to the self, or from the boat to the life—you have to get yourself there.

I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it.

Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.

I’d packed my sadness, despite its enormous size. Each day I lugged it down to the beach with my towel and beach chair and sunglasses and paperback and sunblock and water bottle.

One day, it hit me: The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage.

And then, this: But the best things remain.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

—Lidia Yuknavitch

You say you want to forgive. Have you?”

Someone will ask that, I’m sure, because I ask myself all the time. How do I answer?

—I could say it’s difficult to forgive someone who hasn’t expressed remorse. I could counter with questions: Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn’t seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn’t need to be the goal? The goal is the wish: peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again? I could say this is my task: seeking peace, knowing the wound may never fully close—

“Forgiveness is complicated. To be at peace, I think what I need is acceptance. I accept it.”