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‘I think the time apart will be good for you. You’ll find your way back to each other. Nine years is a big investment! There was a reason you were together. And sometimes, something that’s a little broken can be even more beautiful. Did you know in Japanese pottery there’s this thing—’
chapter title is Well-Meaning Conversations with Loved Ones, Truncated at the Exact Moment They Start to Bring Up Kintsugi, lol
It felt humiliating to admit it, but without a partner to dissect things with, the big and small events of life seemed flimsy. I had accepted that it was over, that it would never be how it was again – even, possibly, that it was for the best, but I would have paid a million dollars for one more cab ride home from a party, drunkenly touching each other’s legs and poring over the night’s events – who had said what about what or accidentally offended whom, who was too drunk and going home with a new person, whether there had been enough snacks and if it seemed like the hosts were going to have an argument later – thrilled to have been out with so many people and more thrilled to be alone, now, just the two of us, on our way home to fuck and laugh and drink cold, cold water.
i dont like the way this is written but fair point
What were they all doing here? What were they hoping to feel, these adults engaged in games from their real or imagined pasts? Distracting themselves, I guessed. This was the conclusion my ongoing hobby experiment seemed to be working toward. Skiing weekends, bowling, after-work volleyball leagues, knowing about professional sports … all activities seemed to be transparent efforts in void-avoidance, when actually nothing drove home the meaninglessness of life more than watching thousands of people desperately cheer as one millionaire tried to get a ball across another millionaire’s line. The only activity that has ever really interested me is sitting around with my friends in flattering lighting, eating food and talking about who wanted to kiss us, and what we were wearing when they did.
Though they’d now been separated longer than I’d known them together, I was often struck by the similarity of my parents’ advice, how many values and first instincts and turns of phrase they still shared. They had been together thirteen years, after all. The love had gone away, by my calculation, sometime around my eighth birthday, but their impact on each other was not so easily undone. They did not seem to relish hearing this, which I understood better now. I was still buying eggplant on autopilot and had only recently realised I did not favour the left side of the bed. Without Jon’s playful sparring, my daily life had become less argumentative, and I discovered I preferred it that way. It was hard to learn traits I’d considered mine alone had been forged with or borrowed wholesale from someone else. How embarrassing, to have to figure out what was Me, what was Him, what was Us. How much more embarrassing, to find out you’d got it wrong.
The therapist opened our session by explaining the meaning of the word ‘liminal’ for almost ten minutes. I couldn’t tell if she felt this was important information for me to have – a legal separation being, fair enough, a definitively liminal period in one’s life – or if she was stalling for time, since Jon was late, and I was getting increasingly agitated looking at the clock.
Eventually I cracked, telling her that I was a graduate student, so knowing how to use the word ‘liminal’ in a sentence was one of my only concrete skills. She smiled with her lips closed and said, ‘How do you feel about your work, are you happy there?’ This is how they get you.
lol
Telling this story, to myself or others, gave me a painful twinge, like snapping my feelings with a rubber band. Yet I repeated it often, loving how clearly it cast our roles: him the asshole, me the long-suffering wife. Not all our arguments were so clear-cut.
She smiled happily. ‘I know, right? I’m like an empath. I adjust to the emotional output of people around me, even if it’s all goth and intense like yours.’
‘I’m wearing Reformation,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you are exuding a gothic energy.’
prob going to feel dated v soon but this is funny still
I want to feel calm. I want a signature scent. I want to be the kind of woman who whips up a galette. I want to enjoy stretching. I want to mean it when I tell someone, ‘no worries’. I want to be good at sports or at least a good sport. I want a partner who thinks my best qualities are the Real Me and my worst qualities are manageable. I don’t want to date someone who thinks I’m only okay. I want to love easily. I want to be gentler. I don’t want to drink so much. I want to be open and nonjudgemental and warm. I want to look pretty with my hair wet
I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.
Somewhere in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the writer imagines himself as a peeping Tom in a darkened corridor, terrified by the sudden possibility that he’ll be caught, that The Other (that important Existential personage) will shine a flashlight on him and reveal his shame. As long as he feels he’s unobserved, his entire being is focused on what he’s doing. He is a pure consciousness, existentially free. As soon as there’s even the possibility of observation—a rustling sound, a footstep or the slight movement of a curtain—all his freedom vanishes. “Shame,” he writes, “is shame of self. It is the recognition that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object….I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me.”