Year one

Aging-

M: Are you excited about this foaming hand soap?

S: (non-committal yeah).

M: Oh, you're not excited about this hand soap? I love it.

S: I like it. I just wouldn't usually splurge for it.

M: Yeah, but it's lasting forever,

S: You're right.


After the movies

M: You're lucky to have a husband as good as I am. Now get your a-- upstairs and make me a sandwich.

S: How am I going to make you a sandwich upstairs?

M: Figure it out.



The days have a certain verisimilitude, which can be described alternatively as comforting or suffocating. The difference between the two probably has mostly to do with perception. In a sense, it had to do with levels of gratitude. If one awakes each morning expecting the world to sing brightly,

then you will be disappointed most days, and on the most triumphant of days, perhaps you will enjoy it, or perhaps you will already begin to reflect on how you will feel about this day in the future, the windswept sky, azure and pure, miles of hills and low lying places of water; you'll start to reflect on how you'll paint the picture of this day when you return home, the exact tenor of her voice, the soft light on her cheek; you'll already start making up a story before the light has even fallen.

By afternoon your mind will have filled in all the blanks. It will not remember that the sky was dark, that the girl never came, and that what you treasured most was being so marvelously alone. So alone that you could almost with that it was always so, and you know that the thought is dangerous, that it's the sort of thing that one lies down with in the crook of their arm and fades into dreamless sleep.

Me, I'll have already swam to that farther shore, where vikings split the skulls of holy men. Alone with my thoughts and those of dead men.