Going in Circles Read Online Free Page B

bodies up to grow another human being, one who takes things from us we need, like vitamins and nutrients. We become a host, a vessel of life-giving blood and shelter, only to be torn practically apart by the childbirth process. Afterward, we are never the same. Our bodies change, stretched and worn, scarred. We can never go back to the person we were before we were two.
    My body might not have just gone through the miracle of life, but grief can create the same internal split. Sometimes you can be hurt so deeply, so badly, that there’s another thing that lives inside you, beside you. A monster of anger, of regret. One that breathes and grows and feels.
    And so, about a month after Matthew had come back home, I left.
    People have asked why I didn’t fight to stay in the house. I couldn’t. I was leaving. Not for a day or two during which I could hang out in a hotel, ordering from room service and reading magazines until I’d decided to go back to domesticated life. Not long enough to have the lady version of the pornfest I imagined Matthew had had. I knew that I was getting out of there for a while, possibly forever. Once I felt I couldn’t live there anymore, it was as if I’d accidentally seen the last page of a novel. I knew what was coming. I had to go.
    I knew it would be hell on everyone. I thought about all of the people who had been involved in the uniting of our lives—everybody from our families, to the attendees at our wedding, to the country’s legal system. Everybody was going to have to make a change in how they saw me, how they treated me. Or at the very least, where they went to visit me. I couldn’t live in the house-minus-Matthew again. It had been too hard the first time.
    I was angry. I was sad. I was cracked. And for some reason I knew without a doubt that I needed exactly what I had just gone through hating: isolation.

4.
    Next item on today’s plan: get to work.
    My job is the most monotonous, unenviable, lame, boring job in the entire world.
    I love it.
    I love it so much, I wish I could kiss it. I would take it out at night and get it really drunk and whisper in its ear, “You stupid, stupid waste of my life. Oh, how I need you. Never leave me, you soul-sucking zombie factory.”
    I’m a technical writer for a software company. This means I help create entries for the Knowledge Base, our web-based tech support. When I was happier, in the year or so I worked here back when my life wasn’t broken, this place was the source of all my misery. I would drive to this fist-size building with my stomach clenched in knots, unsure how I was going to make it through the next eight to ten hours. I knew if I remembered I was a real person, one with flesh and blood and a beating heart, sitting in this puke-green shoebox of an office with no other function than to write words that described how computers worked, I might have driven straight into a tree.
    These days, the fact that my job doesn’t really need me to be an active participant in it—and actually goes better whenI have exactly zero emotions or original thoughts—helps me to live the majority of my life in an intentional coma, an encouraged numbness that requires absolutely nothing from me other than to keep my fingers moving.
    Another thing I love about my work is that there’s one right way to do it. There’s no wondering, no questions to ponder. My job is to provide answers in a clear and precise manner. When I’m really in the zone with my writing it doesn’t even feel like it’s me typing the words. I become a machine, a word producer. A human manual. I am a collection of answers.
    I do have one emotion when it comes to work: sympathy for my office mate, Jonathan. Being in the unlucky position of having his desk exactly three feet behind mine, he’s had to deal with my personal issues for a long time. Proximity has forced him to overhear every phone call, every