from above, the helplessness of being alive
a tale by alice sebold
All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come. It seemed so simple and it was.
My mother's eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought i had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had.
It was a way, I now realised, to try to understand her daughter better.
A miscalculated circling, a sad, partnerless dance.
She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller.
Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
Underneath her smile and exclamations to my sister and me were fissures that led somewhere deep inside her...
Bottled up for years behind that wall, that needy part of her had grown, not shrunk, and in Len, the need to get out, to smash, destroy, rescind, overtook her.
Her body led, and in its wake would be the pieces left to her.
Despite her practiced calm, he could hear the metal in her voice, the iron breaking up through fear now...
She was hollow and lost and abandoned up... my mother was granted her most temporal wish. To find a doorway out of her ruined heart...
She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.