Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,44

food and sexual compulsion, with behavior that hurts people other than themselves again and again?

And yet, there are those who endure agony to live. Trapped beneath collapsed buildings or imprisoned in filthy cells, they sing or pray or write microscopic poetry on scraps of paper to sustain themselves. When the will to survive is present, it is so sure, so clear—but what if that determination is not clear? What if a person has been made weary before their time?

I asked Jack about it one night. We were at Georgica Beach. “Do you think suicide is a tragedy?”

“No,” he stated. “It’s your life.”

“Aren’t you obligated to people who love you?”

“If you love out of obligation, it’s not love.” He was carving ridges and craters in the sand with a stick. “Besides, you’re alone from birth.”

“But you’re born to your parents. To your mother.”

“You don’t enter the bond with your mother when you’re born; you leave it. Birth is the point of departure from the only real communion you’ll ever know. Everything else is invention. Your happiness depends on how well your parents handle that. You know, the fact of separation, the fiction of attachment. Reattachment, whatever.”

“So you owe your parents nothing?”

He shrugged. “I don’t. Maybe you do.” He scraped a platform in the sand. “Most parents don’t want the kid or each other. They’re just carrying out some brain-dead social functions. They marry because it’s time, start a family because it’s time. They do it for fear of becoming outcasts, fear of acting on an original fucking thought.” My name materialized in the sand in large loopy letters. He drew a heart around it. “If abortion had been legal seventeen years ago, I wouldn’t exist. That’s what my old man told me.”

“I can’t believe he said that.”

Jack said, “Believe it.”

“You could have jumped when you were climbing,” I said.

“But I didn’t.”

“Because of me, you said.”

“Because of you.”

“So you’re not alone,” I said. “You have me. You owe me something.”

“You—that’s right. By choice, not by obligation. And if that ever changes,” he posed gravely, “I’ll do whatever I feel like.”

“And would that be my fault?”

“No,” he drilled. “It would be my choice.”

Though I knew he meant what he said, I also wondered if it was possible to isolate a final choice from all the choices that preceded it. Romeo made a choice when he killed himself, but his choice was made meaningful by prior choices—Juliet died first, or so he thought.

“How about lost potential?” I said. “The art van Gogh could have continued to make.”

Jack shook his head. “Lost potential is irrelevant. How can anyone feel cheated out of something they were never entitled to in the first place? The loneliness van Gogh felt was the loneliness he felt, whether it led to paintings or to suicide. Life may be sacred, but maybe his wasn’t sacred. In fact, it’s well-documented that his life sucked. If people didn’t know how to care for him or his art when he was alive, or convey to him the sacred sensation of sacred living, fuck them after he’s dead.”

I suppose it is narrow to wish someone had lived longer in order to enrich your life more. Jack had a point—the irony of mourning people who kill themselves is that the rush of love manufactured for the dead did not prevent them from dying in the first place. If suicides result from a longing to be understood, or reached, maybe it’s not inappropriate for those who remain alive to feel forsaken, to be forced to endure a somber feast of years.

Jack launched his stick into the ocean and watched it migrate. Moonlight seemed to seek him out. My eye trailed from sand to sea to sky, noticing the way his luminescent form touched down upon each, making me think of the relationship between solitude and infinity.

I knew what he was thinking. I tried to acknowledge the breadth of his despair without judgment. I tried to be moved by the enormity of his vision without feeling small in relation to it. If I could not accompany him to the places he needed to visit, I could at least honor his need, because what Jack said was so, is so—love is born of choice. He reminded me of that choice, and he asked me to make it again, despite the risk I took, which was the risk of losing him, and the risk I presented, which was the risk of his losing me.

My face met his shoulder. I wanted