Sitting naked on a pillow next to the space heater wondering if I have committed murder, and can it even be murder if you don’t know for sure if you’ve done it? Forgive them Father for they do not know what they do. That love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it. The mothers and the daughters and the dying, when we think of the future what we are thinking of is our children. It did not occur to me until recently that, if the choice is between killing you and killing my own babies (and that is, in fact, the choice), my greater responsibility is already to them.

I asked the daughter if she wanted to read the story or just look at the pictures, and she said, look at pictures, so we looked at them and said what they were, all the animals and the pink trees and purple trees and ladders and words, and she gives her love so freely, her mother says, but not to everyone. I went looking for Antarctica and found the beginning of time, the beginning of the new notime time, and somehow every movie I see and every concert I hear has a man dressed up in a tiger suit in it. I want that rapper’s tiger coat, I said, and my friend said he would back me up on that one. My fortune says I should reevaluate my plans for the future. My best friend says he cannot breathe. I buy plane tickets for an exorbitant price, I realize I cannot possibly use them, I don’t talk, I can’t say. I would kill you with my bare hands, I text, while sitting in a dining hall crying my eyes out and not eating the food I have gathered in a daze.

Time is the most precious thing you can have, her grandfather says. The rain. The new corset. In Quebec, tabernacle and chalice are swear words. The coincidences. The one I love so much I cannot speak to him anymore. And yet I brag about him, he made that, he did that, my best friend! I have already cried in front of so many people who don’t know me yet. There is a way in which imagining a certain future seems to prevent it from happening. There is a way in which imagining a certain future is the happening of it. To the one I may be beginning to love, I cannot shut up. You already killed me. I feel like my breath is gone I can’t breathe. I can’t believe.

The father has nightmares that someone is taking his daughter away, all night, every night. My cunt, there is no other word, is burning. But Antarctica. But the children. We are twirling around in circles with our scarves and our dresses fanning out. Ever since she was born I have never not been afraid. What is the point of doing it if you’re just going to half-ass it? This is it. This is your life. Next to having a baby, nothing matters. Why don’t we talk about the things that really matter? Death and love and intimate family relationships. Why am I so afraid that my emotion will cause you to have an emotion, that I will get inside, that I will impose?

Where did you go? Why aren’t you here? Why did you leave me? But I told you, I told you, this really wasn’t going to be okay. But I have to get more data, I have to write it up, I have to tell the story. I told only one friend about the time we both came just by holding hands. She said, that belongs in a book. Here it is. This is it. No more waiting until you can do it justice. You can’t, ever. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, that Eliot poem has been echoing in my head for weeks. How did you fail to notice that the world already ended? After the end of the world, there is another world.

The worst outcome is, you kill your opponent, better is he kills you, then, you kill each other, and best is everyone lives. But, then, I always preferred tragedy to comedy. In a tragedy, you kill each other. There is a way in which imagining a certain future causes it to happen.