Our Wives Under The Sea

It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one’s personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things – the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge – is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture.

When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is,unfortunately, endless.

Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.

We had combined our books, our spices, mixed up my table salt with Leah’s jars of nutmeg and rosemary and herbs de Provence.

It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting.

I understand that she needs more salt, but I’m running low and I don’t want to leave her.

“Do people keep trying to bring you coffee?” the woman across from me asks, when she returns from the counter bearing two cups of tea and a slice of depressed-looking apple cake.

There was no sound at all, in fact, except for Jelka talking, asking aloud what it was, what I thought was talking to her through the hatch.