She retrieved the Don’t call me a faggot I’ll cum shirt in other words I will buy this business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.
She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the Don’t call me a faggot I’ll cum shirt in other words I will buy this house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.
