I don’t understand the love that needs to lie to itself to go on loving, she said.
She paused.
She said no more on this. She continued to look out the kitchen window at the sparrows flocking on the fire escape this morning. If your son or daughter is an asshole, and I mean a real asshole, not just in your imagination an asshole, then you must know he or she is an asshole but love them anyway. Why should you love them less, she is thinking, just because they are what they are, which would have to be in part because of you anyway. But let’s say one is an asshole for reasons almost entirely of his or her design. Why do you have to live in denial and lie to yourself to then be able to love him or her, she thinks. That’s not love, she would say.
She sips her coffee.
The sun has now peaked above the line of roofs across the compound from the vantage of her kitchen window. She turns from the sun in her eyes. She thinks again what she said out loud. She often speaks to herself or to others herself out loud.
She sips her coffee slowly but deliberately. She finishes the cup and puts it in the sink. She leaves the kitchen to take a shower. She has to be to work in two hours.
You imagine that it is important for me to say what she does act work, what kind of work it is she does, or even what she looks like, sounds like, says more than I have said she has said in these words I have used her; but you would be mistaken.
The Falling Leaf Review 