For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.
***
We had told people. We had to untell them.
***
If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.
***
He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. "You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones," someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.
***
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
***
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
***
There is nowhere to cry in this city.
***
These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theatre of Hurt Feelings.
***
People keep flirting with the wife. Has this been happening all along and she never noticed? Or is it new? She's like a taxi whose light just went on. All these men standing in the street, waving her over.
***
She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife's broken umbrella and the girl in her long black coat.
***
Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him.
***
The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.
