Crudo

Ты думаешь, что знаешь себя как облупленного, когда живешь один, но это не так, ты думаешь, что ты спокойный уравновешенный или в крайнем случае меланхоличный человек, ты не осознаешь, как легко ты раздражаешься, как любая мелочь, не то прикосновение или не тот тон, недостаточно быстрый ответ на вопрос, определенное выражение лица может вызвать у тебя припадок, потому что ты вечно на иголках потому что ты не научился смягчать свои границы, не научился уступать пространство. Ты эгоистичен, неподатлив и замкнут на себе, ты как малое дитя.

Maybe possessions were like beauty, they made you impermeable. Kathy loathed permeability, she wanted to be gilded, I mean everyone did. The thing about wrenching her heart open was that suddenly loss was everywhere, in the window boxes of geraniums on Kingston Street, in the conkers that had blown gleaming into a skip. Fuck September, with its mournful air. Kathy wanted to bed down by a fire and not leave the house till March but she was flying back to America in ten days. Conveyancing, boarding pass, papers to grade, hotel reservations in Virginia and DC. Some little well was empty, it was weird. Kathy had definitely been this tired, maybe not this scared.

The week before she left Britain an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf and floated away. The Gulf of Mexico was full of dead fish, there was a trash heap circulating in the ocean that would take a week to walk across. She tried to limit her husband’s addiction to the tumble dryer, she never flew to anywhere more than eight hours away, but even lying here on her back she was probably despoiling something. What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world ...

Last night, before going out, she’d had a serious conversation with her husband about marriage. I don’t like proximity, she told him. But why he kept saying. What’s the source of that feeling. It wasn’t a feeling that had a source, except in the way the source of hay fever is flowers. It was just she kept sneezing, it was just that she needed seven hours weeks months years a day totally alone, trawling the bottom of the ocean, it’s why she spent so much time on the internet. So you like talking but you don’t like it when people talk back her husband said rudely, but that wasn’t quite it. She just didn’t know how to deal with someone else being there, especially asleep.