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May15
“ We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. We love each other and we love hard, all of us. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Sexual love, that attraction to the other person, the partner, as well as just the plain everyday kind of love, love of the other person’s being, the loving to be with the other, the little things that make up everyday love. Carnal love, then and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife, too. But I did, I know I did… at one time I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself, and we had the kids together. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you figure that? What happened to that love? Did that love just get erased from the big board, as if it was never up there, as if it never happened? What happened to it is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
—
Beginners, by Raymond Carver. Elle Belle posted a note about Raymond Carver, to whom I’d not had much exposure before reading the linked story at the New Yorker.
It might be a matter of very peculiar resonance, a coincidentally strong familiarity the moments and questions of the story have for me, but I found it quite moving (indeed, a bit too much so).