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A lover moves out of his wife’s apartment and becomes a boyfriend. A boyfriend piles all his scant belongings into a U-Haul and relocates to Chicago full-time and becomes a life partner. A life partner files for divorce, proposing marriage on the final day I am fifty, and becomes a fiancé. A fiancé will utter vows he has written and can—unlike all the clandestine correspondence we once shared—say aloud before our family and friends and, presto, become a husband. And just like that, I will be a wife again.
There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other.
Language is a territory still mostly uncharted.
We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.
[...] My residual guilt isn’t about knowing that I was never going to love my husband the way I needed to again—the way I believe people should love each other if they are going to use up all the days of their fleeting lives on each other. I don’t feel guilty anymore for the fact that I could already glimpse the picture on the other side of our intense parenting years—our children busy with their own lives, at college and out-of-state jobs, our retirement years alone together—and knew I could not stay inside that frame. My leaving was never about retribution for any fault of my husband’s or any mistake he made, but rather that I believe with the core of my being that everyone has the right to choose what ships to go down with versus when to get into a lifeboat and save themselves. There is no one who doesn’t have the right to leave a consensual relationship between adults: no marital atrocities required.
- But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.
- A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.
reading this i cant help but hear the leonard cohen song
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Who, nowadays, watches the light stream through the walls of her “dark chamber” with the company of a phantasmagoric assistant, or smashes at her eyes to reproduce lost color sensations, or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.
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Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.
- Holed up in the north country for the month of May, a May which saw but four days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, rendering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho, looking for blue, for any blue thing. I found only tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of firewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly for gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.
ahhhh
Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Why? I couldn’t understand it. It’s soggy by the time it arrives. It’s like KFC at the bus station. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. Four hours in, it’s really shit.
So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.
That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”
[...] It’s common for people who travel and volunteer to imagine that they are giving and to minimize the amount they’re taking from the society they’re in. The reality is that without absorbing the resilience of the Palestinians, I would have never understood what resilience was. And so I took hope from them. I took from them the idea that when somebody builds a wall, you dig a tunnel.
Whether Tarek Loubani gets justice is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If we could get a couple million dollars to put solar panels on some hospitals, that would be a legacy I would be proud of. What’s the best case scenario if there’s an investigation? The absolute best case scenario is some fucking nineteen-year-old getting thrown in jail for a year for what he did to me. So they would destroy some nineteen-year-old’s life even though we all know it’s a systemic problem? No thank you. I would rather make it so that that nineteen-year-old is never in the position where his whole life depends on him shooting a doctor. I would rather make it so that Palestinians don’t have to go up to the fence with their hands up begging for their humanity.
Owen maintains the mining rigs as they search for whatever cryptocurrency earns them the most per watt, but it is his wife Cassie’s trading that really keeps the family afloat. When not homeschooling the kids, she is glued to her computer, hoping to multiply their earnings by trading the cryptocurrencies that the mining rigs bring in for others she hopes will grow in value. Now that she has a few years of experience, she knows how to spot a “scam coin” and which forums to trust. Most days, she earns a profit.
The children, who range from first grade to college, help with both sides of the business. The oldest daughter has been in charge of keeping the miners cool since she was fifteen. In exchange for fixing the fans, reapplying thermal paste, and maintaining airflow, she gets a cut of the profits. Other kids help with the trading. Those who aren’t legally old enough to have their own accounts use Cassie’s spreadsheets to simulate swapping crypto. Owen reads crypto articles aloud at the dinner table to stir up discussion, and even the seven-year old has an opinion on the family business. (She likes DigiByte, an obscure security-focused coin.) The Collins can keep everyone fed by mining and trading crypto, but only because everyone pitches in.
wow