by
Maggie Smith
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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.
<3
I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
—Lidia Yuknavitch
<3 <3
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.”
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.
the infamous poem [i do like it]
(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)
lmao
My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”
Pints.
“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”
This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.
As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.
My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”
“I told him not to,” I say.
“Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”
“I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”
I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.
“Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”
Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.
I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.
Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”
“Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.
It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.
Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”
I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.
He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but that when his parents got divorced his parents hated each other so much that neither of them could stand to look at the picture anymore, and were going throw it away, so he took it.
I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?
Frank took my shirt back off, but not unkindly.
My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, too, could change.
Thanks, Obama.
chuckled at this
A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he asked you to let him make amends. You said amends were made. Check it off the list. Consider it done. You crushed a cigarette under your boot and ground it into the soil. You kissed the boy on the cheek when he drove you back to your shitty motel and you thought that was a pretty good way to say goodbye to someone forever.
The next morning the woman at the front desk said a man had come looking for you in the middle of the night, around four a.m., and she’d told him there was no one by your name staying there. You gave her back your key on its plastic ring and thanked her. You realized that this generous woman working the night shift at the goddamn Sea Breeze motel had more sense than you, and she’d met him for only two minutes.
ahhh dating the joy of dating a 12-stepper