Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey Read Free Book Online Page B

woman came around refilling our coffee to a constant brim and we just held each other’s hands and we seemed to know something that we had not previously known.
    In that dark autumn and even darker winter we kept meeting for coffee, meeting in parks and plazas and diners and having long hugs and before this I had not been the type of person to want to hug a person, but now I didn’t even think of who I had previously been and what I had previously done because now the only thing that made sense was our shaking chests pressed together because when we were together we were alive and human in a way we had not found in other parts of life, and we would spend hours sitting on benches in cold parks until it got dark and we would go and eat something together and we did this many days in a row, then after a few months we went to his apartment while it was snowing and we fucked like our lives depended on it, like every life on the planet depended on it, like the concept of death depended on it, like the state of being a human, and being alive, in general, depended on our fucking. And this went on for a while and I became a haver-of-authentic-emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper like a grown woman without thinking of the sentence I am being a grown woman, eating off a plate, and reading the news , because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost.
    For a year or so I thought that was how it would always be, that I had achieved some plane of existence that was better than the one I’d been on previously and there was no going back, but I was wrong and there was going back and I went back, I went back and forth, and forth and back again—
    I would sometimes think of my husband smiling and the thought of him smiling would make me smile but hours later I would think of my husband again and I wouldn’t smile—I’d think, Husband, what do you think you’re smiling for, there’s nothing to smile about , and I would think that wasn’t the kind of thought that I wanted to have, but I had had it, and then I couldn’t think of my husband smiling anymore because every time I thought of him he was frowning a pissed-off frown and later I would think, Husband, please smile again , and sometimes, after a while, the thought of my husband would smile again and I would think, Oh, good, we’re fine, we are human, we love each other like adults should, we are grown people. And this went on for some time and sometimes it was easier to keep the thought of my husband smiling and sometimes it was harder to keep the thought of my husband smiling. As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other. If he was no longer a part of my life then the fact that he was no longer a part of my life would be new and maybe the newness was what had made me make sense to myself—not him, another human, just fallible and breakable and not capable of creating redemption—because that’s the thing: people can’t really redeem people and I don’t know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has—because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t sit through time ticking, can’t eat a sandwich off a plate, can’t read the newspaper, can’t put on clothes and go somewhere, can’t be married, can’t keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by