smart enough to wish i was more kind

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

ii) Orphans have bad experiences: in barns, in cellars, in automobiles, in woodsheds, in vacant fields, in empty classrooms. It is because they’re so tempting. It is because they’re so damaged. It’s because they’re so easily broken. It’s because they’re so available. It’s because they’re so exotic. It’s because no one will believe what they say.

vi) On the other hand how sad, to make your way like a snail, a very fast snail but a snail nonetheless, with no home but the one on your back, and that home an empty shell. A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.

x) It’s a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything – every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared, She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we’re grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there’s a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn’t anything of interest happen to us, coddled as we are? Why do the orphans get all the good lines?

xi) (And consider: It is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers. It is you, not we, who have always been the children of gods.)

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together: no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.

Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways. I can’t remember.

Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window, I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you’ve slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can’t recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?

I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks , from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.

I was born.
I was.
I.

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not to well: too much.

“Where have you been?” Yukio asked.

“I was on the roof just now,” said the giant, “And before that I was in some southern orchards.”

“I mean in my life,” said Yukio, “Why have you stayed so far away? Even in my attempt now, to return to my childhood, you’ve shunned me.”

“Childhood?” said the giant, “No. You only get that once.” And then he made a little grunt.

“Then what can I do?” asked Yukio.

“Nothing,” said the giant, “It’s too late, but it’s fine. You’ve done very well, living alone, but so does every tree. And trees are not happy or sad, they are just very good at being trees.” And the giant popped another almond in his mouth and chewed and looked at Yukio.

“I didn’t realize,” said Yukio.

“It’s okay,” said the giant.

by Spencer Krug for We Are Friction