Free A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson Page B

sentences were unpredictable. Sometimes you would actually sing them, and I didn’t know what to do except laugh. You were funny. You didn’t think anyone got your jokes. I’m not convinced anyone did—no one could have been ready for you. Sometimes you would pause in the middle of a sentence and then switch to something extraneous that at first glance didn’t seem to complete the initial thought, but to someone who knew you, you made sense in some hilarious and abstract way that went beyond language. You made something better than “sense.”
    I thought I understood that I would never understand you, but then maybe I secretly thought I understood you.
    You understood me. You put me back inside myself. You made me think I was OK, like I was normal. (Like I was nowhere near normal and that was fine.) Like I was good. Remember? I couldn’t explain myself to you, but then I didn’t have to explain. I wanted to be like one of your thoughts, like one of those unexpectedly and vaguely completed things. You finished my sentences in ways I myself never could have. You came from some other reality with such detail and integrity that it terrified me. You terrified me. I loved you. (Remember?) You loved me too, somehow, and of course I didn’t know why at first, but gradually I did. Maybe I didn’t believe it at first, but does anyone? Maybe you helped me see things that had always been there. Things like me. When we were together, I reminded me of myself. And you were yourself, and who else was there? Maybe there were no secrets anymore. Why would there be? Maybe we lived in a world totally without secrets, and perhaps we couldn’t imagine living in any other. Maybe I only wanted what I already had.
    (And maybe you didn’t need me.)

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    There’s no way to tell it. No way that would serve my real purpose, of course. And so now, as many classic failures have before me, I’ll probably write all frantic and calculated about my mental block, about my inability to write (to express! ) and this, yes this, of course, what a surprise, won’t lead anywhere either, other than straight down a spiralling stairwell of self-consciousness and wasted wit, ending in some dingy gallery of bad, bad writing and shameless narcissism and meta-nothing. And so here I am, standing in this awkward position, and wondering with clenched fists, while browsing around the space, wondering if wait, maybe, yes,
    maybe I can get there from here if only I could just lower my expectations (Hooray!), and sincerely admit that no, I cannot write these things yet, and even if I could, I could never do what I really want and must do: Live Them Again. Even though every stitch of me, every tiny ruthless cell of me is convinced it needs to. But of course my life lives itself chronologically only when it’s least appropriate. Of course there’s no way to get back even the worst, even the fights, and that should be almost a comfort, but no, it’s a weight in my gut, a well-known weight: the ache of wondering, and also of knowing, having known I was pushing and losing her then and knowing that I continue to lose her more and more now as I keep going, and knowing how I should have changed it all, should have just tried harder. But how back then every word spoken was its own battlefield, every exchange something to be won or lost, and how I was trying then, and making a great tour of it, winning them all, and her retreating, vanishing in defeat. If I could’ve just seen her once more, or sent one more email to cap off the series—I could’ve made it a real live masterpiece. Five epic paragraphs dripping with all the rationality of love, the horror but the inevitability of it, and littered with cross-references to evidence against its decline. I know I tried, but not HARD ENOUGH and now here I am, layers upon layers later, months later, still reminiscing all the fights and all the self-hating and