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me: do you think she's happy?

anne: i think she got what she wanted.

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There are days when I am filling up the dog water bowls or wiping off the dining room table with a damp rag or eating yogurt with a fork because all the spoons are dirty, and I wonder what shape life is supposed to take.
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It's nothing earth-shattering. I'm not unhappy. It's just a feeling, like when I wake up in the morning just after a dream that was too good to remember, and all I can say is that there was a woman with a book and a late-afternoon kind of river.
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I think about the people I know, how sad they seem, the things we do with our spare time that I never really even notice because we've always done them, like watching television and surfing the Internet endlessly. I think about how upset I get when I feel like I can't do exactly what I want, and the deeper sadness I feel when I realize that I'm the kind of person who gets upset when I can't get exactly what I want, and it's not okay.
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It's like waking up one day and realizing that your mother left you when you were three, and that's kind of a big deal. Like there are all these things, this wisdom and these relationships and these days you should have spent watching her swan-dive into a river, that never happened. She should have taken you to a neighborhood diner too early in the morning to eat pancakes with her girlfriends or held your chin in her hand while painting bright red lipstick on your too-young mouth, and she never did, and maybe she was never capable of that kind of poetry anyway.
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And one day you're sitting in a library, looking up something about the judicial system for a really boring school project, and you see a photo of a woman in a business suit with long brown hair leafing through a binder, and you feel your loss like an open wound in your gut, like a mocking howl that goes on and on. The chain was broken with you, it says. How could you give this? You can't even name it. And you're crying like the small girl no one ever reminded you to be, over a reference book, over a stock photo of a woman who has hair like yours.
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I just wonder what our relationships are supposed to be like, what our lives are supposed to look like, how we're supposed to feel. I know we're supposed to feel the sharpness, the scary, the glory and the bloody, but what we really seem to feel is numb, and I don't think that was supposed to happen at all. It's like bleeding out inside a plastic bubble.
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I don't want disappointment. Or satiation, her cuter but infinitely scarier sister. What I want is the capacity to live differently, to live at all. Or at least break the bubble and go find someone who knows how to put on a tourniquet.