by
Rachel Cusk
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But it’s a bad day, the day on which I meet J. Things are difficult; it’s hard to talk about anything else. I can talk to J without anxiety. She knows my life and I know hers: our talk is the talk of episodes; the story itself never needs to be explained. All the same I feel guilty. The drama of my life dominates, uses up the fuel of conversation like an ugly army tank guzzling petrol. This is not equality. I’m sorry, I say, I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. I admit to J that I find it almost intolerable when the children are away. I admit that the night before I lay awake until it was light again and I could get up. I admit that I often spend these vigils in tears.
J leans across the table, grips my hand. Don’t ever do that again, she says. Call me. I don’t care what time of night it is, but don’t ever cry on your own again. Call me instead.
<3
Once, perhaps, their differences had invigorated them, but as time passed they seemed to find something more troubling in them, something whose deadliness became ever more apparent as they themselves neared death. It was as though, in old age, they were coming to the realisation that because of one another they had not lived. Then, one day, my uncle did die, and for a few weeks my aunt was as though lit up by a great flash of lightning. She blazed with wild, unrefined life, threatened to alter the will that represented her first experience of financial independence, played one family member off against another, bristled with new opinions and a new intransigence that could, earlier in her life, have become authority but now was a tragicomic parody of it. She uttered heresies on the subjects of marriage and motherhood that had the gunpowder smell of personal truths, argued with and disinherited her children, and then, all at once, like the sea after a storm, retracted into a profound passivity. She lay in bed, beside a small framed photograph of my uncle taken in earlier years. ‘That’s him’ was all she’d say, to those who visited and who, abruptly, she no longer appeared to recognise. She was moved to a nursing home, and in the beige hush of her featureless room lay day in and day out with the photograph in her hand, unspeaking and unmoving, until she herself was no more.
I rent somewhere to stay near a riding school where they will ride every day. I drive west, through unfamiliar hills. I am shaking with nerves; in fact, I can’t remember what it feels like to be at ease. This ceaseless effort to manufacture normality is a kind of forger’s art, so laborious compared with the facility that created the original. It is a fine evening and the sun slants long and golden from the horizon. For me these voyages are like the first outings of the Vikings into the mystery of the ocean, by turns terrifying and thrilling: I have no idea what will happen, what we will find. It is the idea that we won’t find anything at all that terrifies me. Yet what exactly we are looking for I don’t know.
The tree at Y’s front gates has apples on it. They are as startlingly abundant as the white blossom was, yet they are round and hard and heavy, the pregnancy after the white bridal whirl of romance. Y wants to know where my cruelty comes from and why I am so wedded to it. Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it’s like the army; you bring it out when you need to. But all your cruelty is against yourself, he says. I laugh. He is displeased. Why do you laugh? he says sharply. I tell him I don’t have much time for the doctrine of self-love. I see it as a kind of windless primordial swamp, and I don’t want to be stuck there. What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out.
hahahaha wow eerie
[...] The day prior we’d locked eyes across a crowded lecture hall. Now she was seated at the short end of a large table, wearing jeans and a collarless black button-up. Our wrists began to consort on the table and electrified the event until the wee hours when everyone else had gone home. The Monday that followed we broke up with our significant others in two separate but still interlinked scenes, and the week after we moved into an apartment in Hägersten that a classmate had received in inheritance and was now renting out. I was twenty-seven, Johanna twenty-four. We installed ourselves in each other in a manner that only happens with people who are certain of a long life together, as if we’d received a guarantee that only death would tear us apart. We merged our books and belongings without difference or distinction, and we didn’t need to specify that everything we bought (a standing mixer, balcony furniture, a Lars Norén collection titled De döda pjäserna) was for communal usage. There was no future plan, no future theater play, no trip, no party, no move that didn’t include both of us, and as time went on, the references and experiences we had in common multiplied until they filled our lives to the brim. She was my main character. My life was Johanna; the conversations we had, the place on Earth we shared. I would never again be as sure of anyone as I was of her, as sure that I truly had someone. Not even years later, when I met the dark eyes of my newborn daughter for the first time, would I be as sure that I had someone.
[...] We were making lasagna, my daughter was asleep in the stroller in the hall. I turned on the oven and got a large onion from the pantry, cut the root and the beginnings of a green sprout on the other side. And right then I experienced one of those rare moments where everything is laid out perfectly in front of you: the fact that this was my third writing workshop and I was still stuck; my understanding but puzzled friends; how I’d let others support me; how I’d taken out student loans and bank loans and gotten side jobs in a vain effort to find my way back to that room. I peeled the onion and discarded the rustling skins in the sink, got a cutting board, cleaved the onion in half, and got to work making thin slices. It was suddenly clear to me that this room inside of me had been shuttered a long time ago, at the end of the last century. A simple realization, like seeing the weather through the window: it’s raining. The next insight came on the heels of the first and was just as simple, as crystalline: all my writing efforts were a vain attempt to reach for something that was forever lost. The onion was half-sliced, the decision half-made. The third insight presented itself as an image, an expanse that stretched out before me, void of nagging ambition, of any need for ideas. No plans, no vanity. No constant failure. I gave up; I was free. The words for “forgiveness” and “freedom” are the same in several languages; an obvious point perhaps, but in this moment I realized that “letting go” could be said in the same breath. The slices lay perfect in front of me. Sally looked over. “Is that the onion?” She took the cutting board and brushed it all into the frying pan. “Or are you crying?”
[...] in announcing one of the last songs he said, “This is for the lonely lady in black,” and pointed straight at me. I raised my hand and waved a little in response. Our relationship had begun.
Sally and I often had nights like this when we just went out on the town; it could be just the two of us or we might make some calls to people who would join us as the night progressed, not looking for beer or music or conversation with all these strangers we kept running into but rather the feeling of a certain kind of freedom, and if we’d been other people who lived elsewhere we might have gone fishing in search of that same feeling, we might have jumped naked into the ocean and ended the night next to each other on a rocky beach, gazing at the horizon. [...]
cute
So that Saturday then, it was in Vaxholm at a venue with a winterized veranda that looked onto the quay, Zomby Woof was the second of four bands and stepped off the stage right before nine, after which he wove his way to my table by the window. I was solo, sober, alert as if the rest of my life hinged on these moments; I tried to achieve a state of wakefulness that was more than awake, a sort of absolute tension, senses wide-open. I felt void of history, as if I came from nowhere, as if the twentieth century had not happened in me for thirty years already and was now coming to an end, and when we stood up a couple of hours later we had not touched more than this: his index finger had at one point caressed the back of my hand. A few millimeters of skin touching for no more than a fraction of a second, but today, more than twenty years later, I can still recall the way it reverberated, how my blood no longer fit in my veins, the way my life no longer fit in me, the way it spilled over and stuck to everything else, already in the cab home and then at his apartment, several hours, a one-bedroom in Örnsberg with a narrow bed in a corner where our laughter ceased and was replaced by a gravity so demanding that it scared me, because it was no longer about pleasure but about something more fundamental, a room in me where everything was spacious and available, my childhood, my people, the connections between everything. “Desire” seemed like “desire” until I disappeared inside of it and stayed in there. It made a different kind of desire appear, an agreement about temporary magic, when places in us that could not touch did touch. To be permitted authenticity in the midst of this act, with not a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life in peace once more. I was so close to myself in situations like this, right at the edge, but to find him there, in my own flesh, the fact that I was an introvert and still found him there, as if we’d always waited for each other and the sweat and the flame that became ours so fast.
[...] Markus, Sally’s childhood friend who was already at that point a famous director, as well as Paul who was sitting across from Markus and made a point of pretending not to know who he was. We had the entirety of the twentieth century behind us and an unknown millennium in front of us, an epic split, and still we gave ourselves to small things, corrupt feelings. Paul who said, “What’s your name again? Rasmus?” and Markus who corrected him, offended, and Anna, a journalist, who said, “I know who you are, I’ve seen a ton of your stuff,” and told us about an amazing play she’d seen that Markus had not directed, and Markus who corrected this, too, and shortly thereafter got out his phone and started making calls to find another party. [...]
lmao
Five months into the new millennium I had reason to go looking for Alejandro. It was said to be the warmest spring in decades and I’d moved into an apartment that for the first time was mine alone, a one-bedroom in Gubbängen with an east-facing balcony where I could read the morning newspaper in the sun. It was only April when the hagberry blossomed, the caul that breaks every year, and an ardent scent suffused the city’s green spaces like a stubborn ache, a quiet organic fullness that was new and yet familiar, a slower place in time, with a different center. [...]