The Journaling of Conway 952

I have fought the big battles, the ones that hurt. I am always the first to weep at funerals, and the last to bear silent witness at cremations. I have learnt to keep my emotions in check, sometimes to a fault. But even here, where one might expect that I might have learned the value of humility, that I might be able to keep my head lowered and my mouth shut, something goes wrong.

I am talking about the people closest to me. The elderly people who love me – my parents, for example, or my close friends. And the young ones who stand only two doors away from me. hentai

At first, it is beautiful and easy, the way our families sit together, reminiscing, drinking coffee and eating cake. sex It is the behaviour of the old that causes me to feel anxious and the youngsters to make me laugh. The little girl walks into my room, looking at me with the premonition of a toad. We chat, we have a lot in common, we have nothing to fear, everything to gain. sextop And she wants to stay.

Then, a few days later, she comes knocking. “I want to know why we’re not having sex!”

When she tells me, my heart goes towards my parents. Here is a little girl who wants to run away with her beloved husband – an adult, married man – and live with him in a bigger house without going back to school, without having to think about marriage, without owing anything to anyone else but the man she loves. This is a path that is impossible to refuse. My relationship with her has always been close, so when she tells me that, from this day forward, I will not be able to touch her for the rest of my life, I accept her wish. I sit with my parents alone in the living room, surrounded by people and surrounded by Christmas lights. This is the person who lives for the joy of these kind gestures.

She cries, she runs and hides, screaming at the top of her lungs. So does my mother, even though it is only an hour later that she realises what she has just done. “She wants to give up on this life for her own marriage,” she tells me, hard to swallow.

In this moment, I am unprepared for what comes next. My mother is crying, the weeping has not yet stopped. She is surrounded by teenagers who weep with her. We run through every possible insult, every fallacious argument, every accusation that the girl involved has already heard many times before, but cannot tear herself away from her fears. After a few hours of spinning these calamities at each other, eventually, someone points a finger and says: “You all look very tired!” And then the powerful words of God are finally heard – “I have decided to stay this time,” they reply. The tears stop.

My parents can now sit together, chatting and laughing, sharing personal details and laughing a lot. They have come to a new agreement, a truce of sorts. “This should never happen again,” my father pleads. “I will make it happen,” my mother insists. In some ways, my relationship with her is stronger now, but the truth is that I fear that it might never return to what it was. We are nowhere near as close as before, and I don’t know what will happen next.

The memories of this conversation play in my mind. I see my mother, my father, the beautiful little girl, standing in the sunshine. It is now the morning of her wedding. She has dressed herself, each time a little more beautifully. She holds her beautiful new wedding dress, looking all grown up.

Later, we watch the wedding procession in the distance and I pretend to comfort her, by whispering and praying. Her and her husband are now older, less glamorous. She is a bit more melancholy, though when she smiles, I recognise her eyes, her smile, her laughter.

And what is left for me? I have had enough of fighting the battles. I have had enough of my life being determined by one parent. I don’t want to forget myself anymore. And I don’t want to forget this beautiful girl who walks past my door with questions that strike me as almost too silly to imagine, who never takes anything for granted, who sits in my bedroom for hours without speaking.

Only in her name I cannot even tell her that I gave up on my life.

• Brigitte Sorkin’s most recent novel is the short story collection Grandmother’s Elephant. Her next novel, Voices, begins publication this spring.