The gathering

The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches?

You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

a woman with no luggage, no sharp objects, and nothing I haven’t packed myself.

They are young again; back at that moment in life when someone else’s body is a path that might be taken, with no chance of return.

So I left him and he left me. What else are siblings supposed to do?

if he made a home, it was only ever to leave it.

realised, too, that I was not in love with him, but condemned instead to a lifetime of such false intensities, that I would have to love each man I slept with in order not to hate myself,

We do not always like the people we love–

It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.

I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.