We are put on this earth, as best I can discern, to multiply.
Everyone inherits twenty-three matched chromosomes from their parents, forty-six all together. One set determines sex, matched X chromosomes if you’re a girl. The X a baby girl gets from their mother is a random mix of her genes, like overlapped pasts. However, the X she inherits from her father is his one and only. Complete. Undiluted. This means the father is twice as closely related to his daughter via X chromosome as her mother.
When I read this, I realized I didn’t have a fighting chance.
I married a man when I was twenty-one and we split up a year ago. The divorce won’t be official for another month. Of course, I didn’t realize we were strangers until it was too late. My whims are difficult to pin down. Like amoeba, they’ve got no bones.
“You were married?” people scream. Clearly, I don’t seem like the committed type. I get my loose view of forever from my father. He was married twice before he was twenty-five, three times all together.
“No, really, it was just for fun.”
The kind of fun that remains devastating when it ends. Sometimes, out of nowhere, there comes a feeling I thought I’d forgotten. My innards are a tangled mess of things I’ve fucked up, of people I’ve left behind.
I guess nothing bonds two humans like being on the run.
“Do you think we were too comfortable too quickly?” my husband asked.
We moved together like water from the sky, without parachute, without wings, and fatefully, without a safety net.
He broke up with me because I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. I broke up with him because he didn’t understand that everything’s true, it’s just a matter of when. Since my separation, I’ve found my belief system: You Never Have Any Fucking Idea What’s Going To Happen Next.
People ask how I could have missed that my husband was a Jesus freak. I want to ask those same people how I spent nineteen years being head over heels in love with my father. I want to ask those people if they’re really standing on such solid ground.
I am some strange cosmic sacrifice.
If something can get fucked up, it will, in the most meaningful way. Everyone’s life has a tone. I am an ironic comedy, the unfortunate part being that I have no sense of humor.
“It’s best just to accept that you can simply never overcome most points of your personality,” my father always said.
It’s true that only a person’s DNA survives after their death.
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