In response to Falling Out

Many years ago, when I was young, I had a French boyfriend. His condom broke inside me. The boyfriend stopped short, squeezed shut his eyes, said: “It has collapse.” We worried, and laughed, and worried some more.

Now, years later, it’s Monday morning. My French boyfriend is now my reluctantly Americanized husband; our daughter Simone is fifteen. Last night, I let the two of them fend for themselves while I went to a show. What kind of show? they wanted to know before I left. I struggled to say. I had read the description and still I had no clue.

The curtain rose. On stage, a short wall of black plastic garbage bags (Hefty? Some other brand?) stuffed with—what? we would never know—and each marked with a large white number. The wall began to move, as if something buried beneath was awakening, spreading fingers and toes, creating slow ripples. The bags oozed forward, rustling. They’d summoned agency, spirit, animus, and had begun to creep. I leaned in, waiting to find out what came next.

*

My husband likes to talk in the mornings, much more than I like to talk, so he’s wanting to know about the performance. I had left the program on the kitchen table, a mistaken signal that I wanted to discuss. He carried the program to me, to our bed, with my coffee. He is kind that way, bringing me coffee every morning, like clockwork. We have been married a long time; sometimes I forget. When I look at pictures of us from before we were married, it’s true; we have aged, there is proof.

“Emancipatory catastrophism,” I said. I had trouble forming the words because my mouth was still asleep, and look at all those tricky syllables. “That’s what it was about.”

He nodded. I was glad he understood, or acted as if he did. But then, moments later, while my eyes were again closed, he said: So what does that mean?

“Climate change,” I said.

Our daughter came in, rubbing her eyes. “What about climate change?” she said. She told us she had a project due, on climate change. “Mom, I need clothes,” she said.

*

Every story needs a clock. But isn’t this what I find most difficult about life—the clock? Always running out of time on everything. Always watching, waiting. My brain is broken. It can’t hold a line, it can’t dismiss anything, it jerks away, and away, and away. The clock that is my brain stutters, never goes anywhere, but the one that matters keeps on and on. I see the wall of black bags, the spreading of the wall, shiny with menace, into a pool.

*

Today, while browsing my feed, I click on a picture of a shirt that had been stalking me. It’d been showing up, this shirt, every day for several weeks, and I’d hovered over it but never clicked. Today, wanting something I can not articulate, I decide, in a rush, that I need this shirt, that the time has come, that the shirt has come to me because I need it and this is not all aglorithms; this is a kind of fate, a kind of alignment of me and this shirt in time. I click before I can lose the sensation, I go through the clicks and taps required to purchase this shirt. And now, I wait. I wait for the shirt to come to me.