Kelly Corrigan

Because where there's love, there's attachment.

And I don't care what the gurus say.

What's happening to them is also happening, at least at some level, to us.

and all that can accidentally put us center stage, no longer the coach or the minister, but rather one of the afflicted.

But these gritty endurance types I've been admiring have no self and no needs and no agenda, or at least they know how to override all that for the main character, who is not us.

The second thing the brave don't do?

Leave.

or hide inside work or hobbies or some other socially acceptable busyness.

In my worst moments, when sitting on my hands is just unbearable, I have dreamed of going to get an MFA in Paris.

Because if I can't help, why do I have to watch?

It would be nice to leave and start again.

Hardly anyone who's been in a long marriage hasn't at least wondered how it is that the object of their desire has become so burpy and farty.

So bingo-armed and turkey-necked.

Sometimes I see myself naked, stretch marks from pregnancies, scars from cancer surgeries, other things that I don't feel you need to be visualizing right about now.

And I think it's a miracle that man stays with me.

But you know, he's not untouched by time either.

And that's just the physical.

I mean, who here hasn't wanted to be with someone who hasn't seen us eating on the toilet or bitching at the Comcast guy?

leaving behind our own humiliating history, maybe with the nice person we met at art school in Paris.

It's an option.