《Who Will Run the Frog Hospital》Lorrie Moore

'Yes,' I say.  I cannot tell her the truth.  Or can I? Can I tell you the truth?  I might begin.  And she might say, Bien sur.  And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most boisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.

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Daniel has never really like opera.  'What I like is philosophy,' he said to me once. 'Philosophy's great.  Except I don't like the whole Existence thing.  Do we exist?  That really pisses me off.  But I like Good and Evil.  I like What is Art.  But just a little of What is Art.  If you get too much it circles back around again to Do we exist?, which pisses me off.'

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Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart.  It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary.  They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the full course, all the stuff and ramifications.  To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from.  It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.

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My husband has that look again, the look of how difficult the world is, life is, how sometimes you just want to go back to your house with the bushes around it and stay inside... 'Don't you feel, you must, like going home?' Daniel asks in a voice of such ailing homesickness it makes me smile.

Everywhere life is full of heroism.

I lean warmly toward him, try to get closer, in empathy and companionship, to study his face, so moist and young in these rains, to match or approximate it, 'don't be lorn, don't be blue, it's only morn, and I'm with you.' I sing this, but he stiffens, then tries not to stiffen, forces a smile but moves too quickly away.  He does this often now.  Something, someone, keeps him, is kept, in some other corner of his life.  I can't follow him there - where that is, a place of woundedness, we are too without each other.  To meet there would be to step into the strange dark rage of strangers.  But I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.  I can feel the jangle and money of it.  I will wait for him, I think: let him go and sicken himself, confuse himself, dash through the bad woods of himself.  Love is perennial as the grass!  I'll wait for him, my heart in epilogue, knit and reknit, perhaps as it always has been.  I'll wait until I just can't wait anymore.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.