dinner is ruined!
i avoid going to her apartment to see her, and i avoid knowing that i avoid it, but there it is: i hate it. don’t say hate, she used to say, it was on a list of banned words in our house, like stupid, or sorry. she used to say, you don’t even know what hate is. you dislike, you prefer, you don’t want, you want something else — you don’t hate. it’s all out of proportion to what you think you are saying. say something else.
but when i go there (rarely) and i see her trailing off at the end of her sentences, small and swaddled in blankets like an elderly baby because she is always cold now, starting to tell a story and falling into all the terrible gaps between the words, staring vacantly into space, cutting pieces of paper into ever smaller bits in a pantomime of purpose, when i see all this i hate it, there is no other word. i hate it as purely and as fiercely as a child might.