the Nobodies Album (2010) by Parkhurst Carolyn

Author:Parkhurst, Carolyn [Carolyn, Parkhurst,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-14T19:10:59.187000+00:00

“What I did on my summer vacation is I killed my sister and my dad.”

Excerpt from an essay by Milo Frost, September 1992

Chapter Nine

Mitch and I met when we were in college and married shortly after graduation. At the time he died, we’d been together fourteen years. Our marriage was … well, it was many things. Is there truly anyone who can say My marriage was _________ or My husband was _________ and think they’ve said anything at all? Complexity, that’s what it’s all about. The simplest thing that can be said about any person, any relationship, is that it’s not simple at all. (You should see me when I get called for jury duty and the judge asks me if there’s any reason I might not be able to approach a case impartially. It sounds like a riddle to me; I genuinely don’t know what to say. Have I ever been impartial, about anything? Is impartiality even possible within the confines of human nature? Usually after a few moments of this I’m free to go.)

So Mitch and I were … happy, yes, but happiness isn’t what people think it is. There is no synonym for “happiness” that could possibly describe the entirety of a life shared by two people. Bliss? Joy? Ecstasy? Not outside of romance novels and the expectations of twelve-year-old girls. Contentment comes closest, but it errs on the other side. Say your marriage was content, and it sounds like you’re damning it with faint praise.

So this is how I’ll describe it: our marriage was affectionate and tiresome, passionate and dull. After so many years together, the quality of love changes. It’s not that it fades or weakens, but it doesn’t follow the same clear path it did at the beginning. There’s a certain clogging of the arteries; each resentment, each disappointment leaves its trace, and those narrow passages become built up with detritus, making it harder for blood to pass through. The heart, whose job is not to love or to warm or to break but simply to move that vital fluid from place to place, becomes strained with new effort. It grows bigger, not because its capacity has changed, but because that’s what happens to a muscle when you make it work too hard.

And so you focus on the minutiae of each day and lose sight of the larger picture, and slowly the miraculous becomes commonplace. You board an airplane without thinking that it should be impossible for such a machine to take flight; you live with another person, forging good days more often than bad, and never stop to think how unlikely it is that the two of you should be so lucky. A change of perspective is all it takes to shake loose your assumptions: a cloud seen from above instead of below; a husband gone, when you thought you had time to spare.

To say I’ve been lonely since Mitch has been gone isn’t quite right. I live inside my head, and I’ve always been my own best company.

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