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Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” It summoned the pattern Kyle had described. But what did this pattern mean? Why did I keep pursuing these thresholds, even as I told myself I wanted something else? Maybe every rupture offered the chance to emerge as someone else, slightly altered, on the other side of each crisis.
Or maybe I wasn’t seeking what lay beyond each threshold but the experience of threshold-crossing itself. Maybe it was easier to keep living with the fantasy of stability glowing on the horizon, perpetually elusive, than it was to dwell inside the experience of stability itself—its vexations and claustrophobia, its permanence.
It seemed clear that C’s anger was protecting him from grief. It was like smacking your finger with a hammer to distract yourself from a migraine.
It took me longer to wonder if his anger was protecting me as well. Not in the obvious ways, of course. Being the object of his anger—silent and wide-eyed, fists white-knuckled and clenched—made me vigilant all the time, my shoulders hunched around my neck. But his anger saved me from looking directly at his pain, which would have been like staring at the sun.
More than anything, his anger buffered me from doubt. The angrier he got, the harder it became to imagine another version of my life in which I’d stayed.
yeeep
Sometimes I counted the men of my past like rosary beads. He loved me. He wanted to sleep with me. Even just, he looked at me. Even just, I came into being, for a moment, because I was visible to him. It was as if I’d won by making these men want me. But what game? For what prize?
After leaving my marriage, I felt—for the first time—such deep shame when I told people that I’d been the one to end it. I felt no safety, or power, in being the one who’d left. For many months I was like a deer frozen in the middle of a field, holding perfectly still. And when I stopped being a scared animal and looked around, I saw nothing but open winter fields, bleak and withered, full of all the pain we’d made.
It would be simpler if conviction burned away everything else. But it doesn’t make consequences disappear; it just straightens your spine when you force yourself to look at them. Over time I came to wonder if my shame was actually just sorrow in disguise. My divorce was slowly teaching me that grief did not have to wear the clothes of guilt.
She wasn’t wrong. After she went to bed, I pulled out my computer. Often I read my students’ essays. Sometimes I got so tired I could feel the blood pulsing against the inside of my skull, but their minds were good company—their intelligence and humor, the details of their lives, their voices struggling to figure things out. It all felt like abundance, like crouching inside the fullness of the world.
Sometimes the world is heavy-handed like this: the straight hit of sex and the suitcases, the hobo tattoo on the ring finger, the stranger literally yelling, “Get out of the way!” The blaring marquee telling us which movie will play.
Except that’s the easy narrative. The truth was something more complicated. I liked his mind, his voice, the way he laughed. He woke up something still alive in me, ready to thaw.
Still, I fantasized about the tumbleweed playing songs for our kids on his guitar, telling them the story of the night we first met. Even my daydreams hit a wall pretty soon, though. I cringed to think of him hating the tedium of meeting a child’s needs, over and over again; cringed to think of him longing for the road again, the beds of strangers.
At twenty-two, I would have been desperate to make him want all the things he’d never wanted. By thirty-five, I’d learned you can’t make anyone want anything. That was what I told my therapist, anyway. In my heart, I said, Maybe you can? Let me try.
For the first time in years, I was writing fiction—scenes with an artist father and his estranged teenage daughter. She was staying at his run-down house in the Texas desert. When she opened the fridge, I pictured the empty fridge in my father’s apartment. A prior version of me might have been entirely swallowed by the girl’s perspective, her resentment and desires, but now I found myself curious about both characters: the daughter’s discomfort at waking up in a bachelor’s house—quietly opening all the cupboards, not sure if there was anything to eat for breakfast—and her father’s anxious uncertainty. How much did he need to entertain her? Did he need to buy her tampons?
To lose time, to lose myself, to lose the tight orbit of my own looping thoughts, just for an afternoon—these were the things I’d once wanted from booze. But it was always writing that offered the purest version of this surrender.
That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.
Wednesdays and Sundays started to feel less like proof I wasn’t fully a mother and more like freedom. Maybe it was okay to want what I wanted: long nights with friends, or solitude for work, the stillness of a Thursday morning spent drinking coffee at my kitchen table, chewing on pen caps and listening to strangers’ voices rising from the café tables below, where twenty-somethings drank cortados and read Nietzsche before their restaurant shifts. Someone said, “It didn’t end when colonialism ended.” Someone replied, “Who said colonialism ended?”
He believed self-transformation was impossible, while I found it addictive. Choose your heartbreak: stuck in prison, or always on the run.
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When she asked how I was doing, I said something vague but not entirely dishonest. “Oh, maybe a little overwhelmed.”
She looked me straight in the eye—I’ll never forget the clarity of her gaze, its tender X-ray—and, without my mentioning anything about a man, told me that she used to be with men who brought chaos into her life.
She said, “I had to leave those men behind, in order to do my work.”