I spend 24 living a life unrecognizable from my own. I do the things I said I would never do, the things I said were for someone else. I go to the places people would never look to find me.
Maybe I want to be missed. Maybe I am, in small ways, by a small group. But not in the way I thought. I am not asked for. If people wonder about me, they do it silently. Above all, I do not miss myself.
I live 24 free and almost happy. The closest I’ve come to it in a long time. But I live 24 empty in some ways. What does it mean, if you leave behind everything you were, everything you used to define yourself? What was it all for?
At 25, I return. At least, I tell myself I’m going to. I’ll take pieces of 24 with me. Note the rules it didn’t matter if I broke. Note how little of it mattered after all. Note the life I’m allowed to live. Write about living it, maybe. Reappear.
My mother taught me by example. This is how you lie down. This is how people walk over you.
My father taught me by example. There is always a man in the room who speaks louder than you. Your voice is only valuable insomuch as it agrees with his.
I did not need to be told that I should have soft opinions, that I should avoid having strong feelings. I learned this without words.
But what am I, stripped of voice?
A blank slate, to be written on and cleaned again by people who have been taught to have things to say.
The first time I met with this friend of mine, he said he liked the way I responded to questions. A yes, a little nod of the head.
“I’m very agreeable,” I told him.
And I think I should’ve felt it then, the absence of self in this identifying trait—one that relies on being pliable, becoming whoever best fits. But I was pleased that he was pleased.
He is not, I would say, a part of the problem. He is only a moment which I can point to and realize that I have been shaped into something less than a person. I did not care where we went or what we had for dinner. I did not care how long he stayed or who drove or what we talked about.
“I’m happy if you’re happy,” I’ve said to too many people. I think it’s a nice sentiment. It would be nice, if it only ever meant “your joy brings me joy.” When I say it, I think I mean something more akin to, “My happiness hinges on your approval. Your contentment is the only purpose I serve.”
Consciously suppressing your desires for the sake of another person, I think that’s fixable. Leaving your opinions unstated, fixable. The inability to say no, fixable.
But there’s something more than that. I learned I am meant to be small and I made myself so. I am small enough that I can’t find myself.
Is it suppressing your desires when you lack desire to begin with? Can you state an opinion you cannot form? Could you say no if the only value you can find, the only rewarding thing you can do, is in giving people what they want?
23 was full of resolution. I was going to set goals. I was going to start living. I forgot that a sense of purpose requires a sense of self. If I am no one, how do I become anything?
“I am boring,” I say. “I am nothing.”
This is not exactly true. I was always someone. It is a question of who that someone is, a question I’ve been taught not to ask but feel I should know the answer to by now.
This year, I think, is the year I will finally find out.
When I worked in the produce department my boss told me they were her favorite kind. Sweet, she said. I should give them a try.
But I think I will leave with generic yellows.
It’s not that he didn’t love me, or that I couldn’t have loved him, or that we didn’t have a certain sort of relationship, he told me. It’s that he knew I was never going to give it a chance.
Overly reliant on archetypes, one on the list of reasons I have yet to make anything great. Your writing has feeling—beauty, even, when you work at it—but when are you going to make us think? When are you going to surprise us?
I put the vidalia onions in my cart, walk around the store with them, picking up this and that from my list.
He married someone much older. Us barely into our twenties and her pushing forty. He called me once, a few years in.
I miss you sometimes, he said. You understood me.
I didn’t know how to take it. Was he sincere? Angry at his wife? Getting overwhelmed by their differences and finding me an easy ear for his problems? He was drunk, anyway. I heard it in his voice, could’ve guessed it by his words. Even if he hadn’t been, I would’ve done what I always did, which is nothing.
Too many years had passed. What did I care? Yet, that mild annoyance—I had answered the phone, hadn’t I?
So your protagonists are too stagnant for too long. People aren’t like that. People are dynamic, and readers want to see change.
I am standing in the middle of an aisle googling what to use vidalia onions for. Onion rings, the first result. I am not someone who likes onion rings. But maybe this is the ingredient I’ve been needing to change everything. Maybe I am someone who could be someone who likes onion rings.
There is something rosy and warm in knowing what to expect from a person. I did not try to love him—he was right about that—but we knew where we stood with each other. I couldn’t comprehend why it grew so complicated from that.
He had a girlfriend for a while when we were in high school, still in the center of it all. And I did nothing wrong, barely so much as spoke to him when they were together, but I was to blame when it ended anyway. The first time he said he loved me was not to me but to her.
Nothing good comes of hot food left to linger. At a county fair, I was saving a basket of onion rings to share with my sister. I waited 40 minutes for her to come find me at the picnic table. When she arrived they were slimy and soggy and I forced down too many that would soon force their way back up.
I backtrack to the produce section, put the vidalia onions away after all.
Resolution, another weakness. Where is your story going? And what is the point?
Generic yellows. I’ll make a stir-fry. I like stir-fry. I’ve made it many times.
My best friend talks about the complexities of her romantic entanglements, the subtle shades, so much nuance. She tells me that there are so many people to fall in love with in the world and so few of them are the right ones. This discovery makes her somehow more adult than I am.
I remember telling him not to wait for me, when we were young. And he didn’t, but he didn’t give me the shut door I wanted either. So I watched him mostly-move-on through the crack.
I could’ve met someone, gotten married myself. I could’ve blocked his number. I could’ve, at the very least, let it go to voicemail.
As I pick out a few yellow onions, I remember working in the produce department, shelving dozens and dozens. How many times did I take a box from the back, put it on my cart, push it out to the stand, empty the box, throw it away?
Cyclical. I think that’s all love amounts to. Something building, cresting, crashing. Something that you work to get over until it starts up again, maybe in a different place, with a different person, to a different extent. So I’ve skipped over it.
Stagnant water is a breeding ground for bacteria, my friend says.
I am too afraid of risk. Too unwilling to try. I do nothing to encourage the growth of good things, nothing to stunt the growth of bad ones. I ruined him, he told me, by doing nothing at all.
I see that I will not achieve greatness. My work falls flat, molds in its stillness.
While we’re waiting for his girlfriend to pick him up, Bryce is lecturing me on punctuation. “The semicolon,” he says, “is for writers that are scared of commitment. Just end things. Let them be over when they’re over.”
***
I used to smile pretty for my ex. Sometimes all I can think about is how many times I showed him my teeth. I wonder what kind of person I was to him, if he saw me how I saw him—more fangs than pearls most of the time.
The thing is I can’t leave the past in the past. I’ll carry it all, hoard every memory until my mind is uninhabitable. The space he occupies is nonfunctional, but I don’t pitch him out, clear room for the next thing. I am only ever stacking the next thing on top.
***
When I took Standard English Grammar, Clay made some off-hand comment about “advanced punctuation.” The professor asked what he meant and he said, “You know, semicolons and stuff.”
He got reamed for it by half of the room. My best friend leaned over to me. “Journalism major,” she muttered with a roll of her eyes.
I shrugged. “I’m pretty much a journalism intern.”
“Student writing intern,” she corrected. “Wash your mouth out with soap, and recite ‘I’m majoring in literature’ 50 times.”
***
Butterfly catching is for children. Something I graduated beyond without ever doing. I stood in the field and watched the others chase all of the brightly colored, vibrant things while listening to him explain how little I knew.
He was right there. No net needed. Butterflies, the least of my concerns. This was love, without the puppy-dog optimism.
He sneered at foolhardy romance, at supposed soul mates fawning over each other. He loved me like I was disposable, and it was, in its way, more practical. All things will end one way or another.
But how I’ve wished I could have caught a beautiful, flighty, impractical promise of something more.
***
My writing professor told me it’s not that you can’t use the semicolon; it’s just that you have to have a reason for it. The thoughts have to be linked, parallel somehow. If you can’t answer the question of why you didn’t end the sentence there, you probably should have.
***
How I’ve wished that when I met her, I’d had a clear space. How I’ve wished she could’ve been the first, the butterfly season.
It’s not so much him that I was stuck on. There would have been no relationship between the two if not for the fact that somewhere along the way his outlook became my own. I decided that to change my life forever, for her, for the limited period she would occupy it, was not worth the hassle.
I missed the window for frivolity. Love, the second time, had a gleam I now recognized as deceptively overvalued. To spare myself having to end it where it would’ve run its course, I did not start it at all.
It is not how I wished to think; it is not a line of thought I can stop believing.
How I’ve wished, when I hear it echoed in my feelings for her, that I had never met him.
***
We don’t use semicolons at the company I work for. It’s explicitly written into the style guide that we avoid them. “Use an em dash if you have to,” my boss told me, “but the goal is to keep our sentences as short as possible.”
***
My best friend scoffs at me.
“It is a non sequitur to say that because you loved someone once and it went poorly, loving someone again will be just as bad,” she tells me.
I fixate first on whether it’s accurate to say things went poorly, whether ‘bad’ is really the quality I have carried over from my relationship with him to a greater association with love. It is not, I realize, her point. Her point is that I carried anything at all.
I connected him with my present, let him bleed into it. Sometimes all I can think about is her. Smiling—all pearls, no fangs.
I should have laid him to rest. She should have been something new. Her own sentence. Simple. Separate.
***
“And another thing,” Bryce says as his girlfriend pulls into the lot, “semicolons don’t do any favors for people who have issues with run-ons.”
It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond. That’s what I spent hours burning the midnight oil for. To have the distinction of being the big fish.
Do I need distinction? I can’t sell it or trade it or make anything useful out of it. Accolades are mere decor, something to set out and stare at. I collected trinkets until my room was overfull. My dad taught me to be a maximalist, his lessons squeezed into brief appearances between his 60-hour workweeks.
People who read his resume are blinded by all the shiny, pretty things; they never see between the lines, check the math.
I wanted to take creative writing in high school but they couldn’t fit it into my schedule. We have to give priority to your AP courses, my guidance counselor said.
I want to study English, I said. That was deemed unimportant, a waste.
You’re so smart. You have so much potential. You could do anything.
The point of being able to do anything, I learned, is not the freedom to do whatever you want.
When I placed in a high school creative writing contest, I was allowed for the first time to dream of pursuing it in college. It had become something that could be bragged about. My dad introduced me to people as a talented writer. When I asked him if he’d read the story I submitted, he said, I skimmed it.
In college I was a big fish. I won awards, got the writing internship, took over the campus literary magazine. I was building my own nest of shiny things. The whole department knew my name because that is the compromise for giving up everything you could have been. If you are not going to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, then you’d better be excellent—better than excellent—at whatever you do instead.
I started losing weight, losing sleep, losing hair. It was falling out by the handfuls, in my bed and in my shower. I left trails of it wherever I went.
My dad noticed something amiss long enough to sit me down and tell me I needed to take better care of myself. Seeing you like this is killing me, he said.
Funny, I wanted to say, I don’t think you’re the one that’s going to die from this.
The remora, or suckerfish, attaches itself to sharks and other large sea creatures, feeding off of their scraps and parasites. Coasting. It is everything I was taught not to be, yet after college, I found myself seeking a quiet space, a comfortable one.
My dad asked me when he was going to see my name on his bookshelf.
I told him I don’t write anymore. Then where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I try not to feel pressure to answer that, but I can’t help the niggling feeling that my life now is yet another waste. I used to be talented, or I was told so.
When I say I don’t write anymore, I don’t mean that I don’t write anything. I mean that I don’t write anything notable. That I’ve been haphazard with my ideas, throwing this and that at the page.
My friend tells me my writing has promise, and I think that’s the wrong term. Promise is for things yet to come. What I have is a rusty habit for craft that kicks on and off intermittently, sputtering and rattling across the page. It is a remnant of a bygone era, barely hanging on. You can see its evidence, but it is not promise.
Still, I tell people—and try to believe it—that I don’t have to be a great writer, a great anything, never had to amount to something more than I am now. I tell people this is enough, a regular desk job with regular hours. I tell people it is ok that I gave up.
There are enough shepherds. Let me be a sheep. There are enough trailblazers. Let me walk the path. There are enough big fish. Let me be the remora.
Today I took a walk through the old neighborhood. They turned the elementary school down the street into a childcare center, replaced that old curly slide on the playground. The one with the canopy top where students would Sharpie initials and hearts. I remember walking over and sitting at the top of that slide in a rainstorm with my sister, our knees pressed together and we talked about all the problems we thought we had.
They filled in the pool where I joined a swim team for a grand total of one summer. The one where the coach made me stay after to practice fly, but I never quite got it. On hot afternoons, my siblings and I would buy Airheads at the concession stand for a quarter, practice underwater handstands, have contests to see who could hold their breath the longest. It’s just a slab of concrete now.
I walked by the neighbor’s house. The one where we played cards and tag and any game that suited our fancy. One winter we tried to make the world’s largest snowball and we pushed it all the way down the street, then lugged it back on a sled. But the neighbors have moved and we have moved and so have most of the people we once knew.
I took a walk in the old neighborhood thinking it would fill me with nostalgia. Thinking some familiar faces and places would do me good. I’ve never really found “home” since we left. Instead I see how little spaces stop to miss you, how much they grow and change and forget about the memories you made there, even when you don’t. All I’m reminded of is that walking is better when you still have a destination.
We met outside, next to the coffee shop. We didn’t discuss it beforehand—just made a plan to stroll through town, check out a store or two—but we both knew it would happen that day. Which is why I wore that dress with the small rosebud pattern. And why I arrived far too early and slipped inside to order a latte with the heart-shaped art even though my mom said I was too young for coffee. I didn’t drink it. Instead, I ate the three mints I had stashed away in the bag I didn’t need but insisted on carrying. My sister taught me that every woman needs a purse.
I tossed the empty mint wrappers back into my bag to reside with a few crumpled-up bills and a single tube of lipstick on loan from my best friend. Should I put some on or will it smear?
It’s tacky to put on lipstick anyway, I decided, then went outside. I straightened my posture, tried to look confident, mature, as I walked toward him.
But when he asked to kiss me, his breath smelled like onions. I said yes anyway because what else was I supposed to do? We were standing, tucked just out of sight around the corner of the coffee shop, for one reason only. It was supposed to be romantic. Except, the thought of his hot onion breath pouring down my throat repelled me at just the wrong moment and I forgot to kiss back. His lips mashed into mine and pressed them uncomfortably into my teeth.
When I felt his tongue prod the line of my closed mouth, I took a step back and told him it was nice even though it wasn’t.
People who say God opens a window when he closes a door probably imagine him opening things up from the inside, walking alongside them. But sometimes I feel like God is outside, above, and I am a rat in some labyrinthine structure of his design. He’s shifting walls and changing paths and everything is moving with a vertigo-inducing fluidity I can’t comprehend.
I am stumbling forward for some promise of a reward when I reach a dark room. The door slams behind me. I can’t go back now and there’s nowhere to move forward. At least I am stopped for once. At least I can get my bearings. And then God opens a window and tells me I’m ready to go outside. But maybe I don’t want to climb out the window. Maybe my eyes are getting acclimated to the darkness. Maybe I’ll at least know what to expect here. I stare blankly at the open window. I’d never know what to expect outside.
God pokes his head in, wonders why I didn’t follow where I was led.
What do I do when I’m out there? I say.
He doesn’t tell me but says he’ll leave the window ajar a while longer. That he’s giving me a choice.
I sit, knees tucked to my chest, and make no move to get up.
He shakes his head at me, but I can’t read the meaning. Disappointment, or dismissal? The way you shake your head at a kid chasing their sibling around with a bug in hand. What can you do? Kids will be kids. This is the nature of things.
God leaves me there, does not come back. I see the window slowly start to fall back into its frame. Do I stop it?
Wouldn’t it be easier, even if I must live in dissatisfaction, to know I never tried? Never failed.
***
My life is what I’ve always wanted in a lot of ways. I’ve achieved what I set out to do, in my education, in my career.
When I tell my friend I’ve run out of things to do, she laughs. You’re so young, she says.
What I mean is that I’m at the end goal. I’m where I’d always pictured. My life from here will be more of the same, years and years of the same, and I thought that would feel more satisfying than it does.
There’s more to life than your job, she tells me.
I know this, but I struggle to think of what. Relationships I do not want? Children I’ll never have? New hobbies I’ve no interest in?
To be honest I thought it’d take a lot longer to get where I am. I was counting on it not being so easy. Saying so sounds like I’m digging for things to complain about. Sounds like I’ve never had a real problem. Except, my happiness has always resided more in the looking-forward-to than the being. I don’t know what to do with the paper once the checklist is crossed out.
So, I can focus on the small things now. The meeting your acquaintances for coffee, taking a walk in town, cooking a new recipe. And it helps. Until I back up, take in the whole image.
This is all my life is, ever will be. It’s all I could think to ask for.
***
First I was grasping at the straws of the past. Holding on to happy moments. To people. Faces long since erased from my day-to-day, turned to wispy apparitions occasionally summoned by the intrusion of a memory.
Eventually my gaze had to shift toward the future, that vast expanse from which I had always averted my eyes. It's time to look ahead, to figure out where I was going.
But what I see is an alarming impermanence. It’s that saying I’ve heard a thousand times—the only certainty in life is death. And what will I leave behind? Not much, I think, and it troubles me. Who will remember me when I am gone? What do I have that will remain?
I am not trying to build a grand legacy. Just a small, stable, secure one. Just the way I like everything else.
The problem with doing things small, doing things sheltered, is that I am huddled in a room I was supposed to leave years ago—laboring over a speck in a world of people outside paving wide lanes, people who do not bother to look at specks.
I am trying so hard to leave my mark, but they will write over what I have created. This is the nature of things. The way everything is supposed to come and go in its time, but I want to exist in a space forever. Just one. And that’s too, too much to ask, I know. But I want to have mattered. I want to have something people will look at and acknowledge as mine. I want to venture out of my room at least once.
I am not ignoring your question, your text message, your should-have-been-simple request.
Sometimes my brain runs places that it could walk. So when you ask it to run, you find it out of breath and unable to move. I am sorry my body expended all of its energy on going to the grocery store, on making a simple phone call, on replaying and critiquing the 30-second conversation I had with my neighbor when she stepped outside for a smoke. I am sorry it saved nothing for you.
It’s fine, you say.
And for you maybe that’s the end of the discussion. But you say it’s fine and I think you’re probably lying. You’re probably annoyed and just don’t think it’s worth getting into with me. That I’m not worth the effort to argue with.
I’ve chewed my nails to stubs, picked the skin on my fingers until it bled.
I’ve spent hours pouring over our conversation history, hunting for subtle clues. The truth is I decide how you feel more than you do; the truth is I’ve forgotten how to tell what the truth is.
I’m so wrapped up in the complexities of what you could be feeling, I’ve lost sight of how you actually feel. And I am so tired, more tired than ever. But I can’t stop spinning circles, burning rubber. The acrid scent fills my nostrils and I am thinking “it’s time to stop” but find I am not as in control of my own self as I have always tried to be.
It’s like this: I always joked I would be alone forever and one day I truly will be. Whether I drive everyone away or they wrap themselves up in their own lives, there will come a day when no one seeks me out anymore. When there are no more questions, text messages, requests to be answered.
There’s nothing I’ve hated in life so much as inevitabilities. That’s what keeps me up at night—the thought that there are things I simply can’t change. Sometimes I think I would take on the weight of the whole world if it meant I could decide where everything is going. Then I remember how hard it was to schedule my own dentist appointment—how I rehearsed what I would say for hours beforehand, how when the receptionist answered I froze up and forgot all that, stuttered out something so incoherent she had to ask me to start over. I realize I’m not even capable of handling my own life. What would I do with anyone else’s?
I am not as in control of anything as I have always tried to be.
Too-tight T-shirt with the beginning of a beer belly asks me how many drinks he has to buy for me. He looks and decides I’m the cheapest charade he can get to meet his needs. Why dance around—you like whiskey? For a finger or two, he suggests we get out of here so I can drop more than the act in the back of his GMC.
My friends tell me it’s too risky to keep going out alone like this, like loneliness isn’t the only one who volunteered to come with.
I tell T-shirt I’m just not that type of girl and he calls me a whore when he leaves, which is the opposite of what he means. I’ll still take the insult—I’ve swallowed worse.
Barrel of a gun. Lead touching lung. My grandfather died when he was 41. We never met, but he left me his demons.
When I look at you, I see him, my dad says and I don’t know if it’s said in love or fear. If he’s wondering how many years I’ve got left before I ask for my check.
The waiter brings me a cosmic tally. I’ve got too many debts. I’d cause too many upsets.
I’m not getting drunk tonight. I’m having water with ice. I poke a cube down with the straw and watch it float to the surface. Everything I bury comes rising up again. The other day I ran into an old friend.
I saw them across the way and stepped out into the street. Some pull had come over me—I wasn’t even looking. And then a car swerved, blared its horn, and I stumbled back, hearing my own heartbeat. My friend, having observed the scene, came over and asked what I was thinking.
We are on the balcony and I’m watching her smoke. I’m still not quite used to that.
“Probably not the best habit for a runner to take up, huh?” she said with a shrug the first time I saw her do it, when she bummed a cigarette from Mayfield at her sister’s ex’s birthday party.
I shrugged in return. “Well, how are the lungs holding up?”
She took a long, punctuated drag then. We didn’t discuss it further. Since then it’s become just another one of those things. Something that wasn’t before and is now. Something we pretend doesn’t exist so we don’t have to face that we’ve changed, that we’ve been apart long enough not to see it as it happened.
Her sleeve shifts when she reaches to snuff her cigarette out in the ashtray I dug out of my old middle school artwork and I catch a glimpse of her tattoo. An outline of a world map. I’m not quite used to that either.
She is back from her latest trip and she is telling me about the experience of arriving in a place where no one knows you.
“When you meet someone new, don’t you feel like it’s a chance to start over, to be whatever you want?” she asks. “Sometimes it’s hard to come back from that. To a place where everyone knows me, where they’ve already made their mind up about me.”
She’s not saying she’s thinking of me, but it’s hard to believe she’s not.
I want to tell her that I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone’s perception is rigid. I want to tell her that after years of knowing everything there is to know about her, I could write a whole book on all of her favorite things, most embarrassing moments, every formative experience she’s had, but there are still times when I look at her and she is a stranger again. Could I ever weigh her down with any certain expectation?
“Sounds confining,” I agree, because I know that is what she wants—a subtle permission, the gradual start of undoing a tie.
“It’s like I can show anyone any side I want to and that’s me to them, you know?”
I don’t know. I’ve always been too open too quickly. I’ve never stopped to curate parts of myself for anyone. If the decision is between being known as you wish to be known and being known as your whole self, I would rather be honest. I prefer people’s opinions of me to actually be of me.
Of course, to say so would be an admission of that change we try so hard to tiptoe around, an admission that the change in each of us has been in an opposite direction. Neither of us has ever much liked ourself and so she is thinking, “This is our remaining common ground. This is the explanation I can give that she will understand. That she will accept and let me go.” But she doesn’t realize that while her response to every perceived negative aspect of herself has been to stuff it down—to hide it until hopefully everyone forgets about it and maybe so will she—my response has been to put those things on display. To not get close to people until they’ve decided they can handle my flaws. She doesn’t know that I don’t want to run away from myself as desperately as her, because to her running seems only natural.
Some time passes before I speak again. Silence was never this leaden for us, never seemed to stretch as it does now. I am thinking of clumsily woven matching bracelets. I am thinking of notes passed in world history class. I am thinking of a birthday cake with 18 candles. I am thinking of cramming ourselves into my bunk that week she stayed in my dorm room. I’m thinking how we’ve always found space for each other until now.
“You know you could do anything you want, be anything you want, and I would love you.”
This time it is not what she wants to hear. It is not me making things easy on her.
She sighs. Takes out her pack of cigarettes and fiddles with it, but doesn’t start smoking again. “How can you promise to love anything I might become?”
“Because it’s you,” I say.
“But I don’t want it to be. You don’t understand what I’ve been trying to tell you—” She stops herself there. Shifts in her seat. She is deciding something.
I am afraid. Afraid that I have made this conversation too direct. Afraid that she’s not, in fact, deciding but has made up her mind and anything I say would be fruitless.
“I’m moving,” she announces. “Far.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” she echoes and there’s a sort-of smile on her face like it’s almost amusing how unprepared I was when it should’ve been obvious but it’s too pitiful to really be funny.
I am thinking of her sister’s ex’s birthday party, the first time I saw her smoke. I am thinking of goddamn Mayfield and how he hovered around her. How she left me in a sea of strangers to go fuck him in the bathroom and then told me about it as I gave her a ride home like I was supposed to be impressed. I am thinking how it was the first and only time I had been truly mad at her, and how she had been so happy, thought she was so cool, so finally-fitting-in. I told her she ought to get tested, that it was hard telling where a guy like Mayfield had been. I didn’t mean it. I barely even knew Mayfield. I just wanted to piss her off. I wanted to make her feel bad about something since she was certainly fine with having invited me to a party where she introduced me to no one and then abandoned me after a grand total of maybe ten or fifteen minutes. I am thinking of how we fought that night, and how I felt so guilty for ruining her excitement by the time we got to her apartment that I got out of the car and walked her to her door, apologizing all the way. I told her if she liked Mayfield, she should go for it. That I really didn’t think he was all that bad and that I was being crabby for no good reason. I am thinking how she cried then. How she told me she didn’t want to argue like that ever again and I promised we wouldn’t. I am thinking how she asked me to come in and we played card games and ate through all of the chips in her cupboard and talked until we saw the sun peeking through the windows. Just like we used to.
Used to. “How far is far?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Does it matter? Ten hours, fifteen? It’s not here.”
“I wish we had talked about this sooner.”
“Sooner? I’m telling you now. This is what I want. A fresh slate. And I’m leaving all of this—” She gestures at the scenery around us but I am thinking again how she really means me. “—behind.”
I feel the weight of it press against my lungs. I’d always known she might leave, but just as much I’d always assumed that her leaving wouldn’t be a goodbye. That there was too much here to leave behind. I’m starting to realize that it doesn’t matter how much past there is; it’s still the past. I’m starting to realize that the “too much” is exactly why she wants to leave this behind. She’s not asking permission after all. She’s not waiting for me to undo the tie. She’s cutting it off and this is not a request but a warning.
Even so, I am thinking of her bringing me dinner when I was dogsick and couldn’t get out of bed. I am thinking of driving to her house at 3am when she decided cleaning her ex’s stuff out couldn’t wait another day. I am thinking of ordering two coffees and a breakfast burrito split in half, of going to garage sales and buying the weirdest items we could find then showing each other to see who did better, of all the tiny little things that were ours. I am thinking that’s the problem with forming habits that are hard to break. How empty I’ll feel, how miserable, how if I’m lucky I’ll maybe get a phone call or two like that amounts to anything after all of these years. And as she drives off and I see her car disappearing around the corner, I am thinking I am not even that lucky.
In my dream, a building collapses. A tall one. 14, 15 stories. The skeletal remains give you some idea of what the building used to be if you can imagine it used to be anything. There are appendages sticking out of the rubble. Blood everywhere, soaking pages of scribbled-on forms, legal pads with notes that no longer need to be remembered. That crayon portrait of a family holding hands under the sun used to be pinned to a cubicle wall next to a wedding photo. It is all debris now.
There should be people screaming, I think. I could swear I see a finger twitching somewhere. But it’s only silent.
A woman, midforties, wearing a navy blazer over a pale pink dress, begins climbing the over the destruction in her kitten heels. She sets a microphone down on a fairly level spot so she can use both hands to pull herself up, then picks up the microphone again, stands, dusts herself off, and turns to smile at a camera.
Can they show this on the news, I’m wondering. There’s got to be some rule about that. It’s too fresh a gravesite.
I was wrong before, about it being silent. There are wheezing, rattling breaths coming from the far right corner where a passing dog got partially buried under the brick. It grows so loud I can barely hear the reporter speaking over it, something about casualties, something about a lawsuit, something about tragedy.
When the camera stops rolling, she starts to clamber back down and suddenly pauses midway. The heel of her shoe has punctured the eye of a corpse and she slips her foot out, hovers with one leg tucked up flamingo-style over the dead body. Dream-me knows somehow that she is wondering whether she should pull the shoe out of the eye and put it back on. What would be least disrespectful in this scenario? She settles for leaving the shoe behind and it hangs there from the socket.
I tell myself she will cry when she gets home. This is the only way I know to make sense of it. That she only put on a good face for her job, a job of the worst sort, but she will remember this and sob for hours.
But I am not here to observe this woman. I am here, I know, to find somebody.
I wake up mid-search, my hands dusty and blistered and coated red from heaving around jagged pieces of office building—my blood or someone else’s? But when I look down my hands are clean. There is light pouring in from the window of the room in a house I no longer live in. A house I came to in hopes that it would help not to be alone. Someone ought to have woken me up, I think. They shouldn’t have let me see all that.
But they don’t know, and how could they? I’ve never witnessed something so tragic in real life, never been given a reason to think of such things except in passing mentions.
Still, my mom notices. She tells me I look tired, tells me I look worse every time she sees me. Maybe letting me sleep late was all she could think to do, but sleep like this makes me nervous to close my eyes.
Dad says I have anxiety because I watch too many violent TV shows. At least that’s what he’s saying now. Last week it was because I was in spiritual poverty and the week before that because my generation is too soft. This week, though, he’s convinced my mind has been infected by televised rot. I know none of that is real, I point out to him. Still, you put garbage in, you get garbage out, he says before flicking on the evening news.
God, the world is burning, isn’t it?
I hear about things, everyone does, but it’s been so long since I really took a look. I guess I decided somewhere along the way ignorance was as close as I would get to bliss. That probably makes me terrible. Who buries their head in the sand when everyone around them is suffering? Am I the kind of person that will step over bodies, dig my shoe into someone’s eye, and go home with a straight face? I am doing what I need to do to survive, I think. That is not a good enough excuse, I also think. It does not stop me from leaving the room just ten minutes in to the report.
On Monday, a derecho passes through the Midwest, and, beyond confirming the safety of my family and my coworkers, I do not look into it. The next morning, my boss tells me that she knows someone who knows someone who was asleep when her window smashed in. She was cut by the shards of glass and bled out. When I get to my desk, I barely hear the office chatter, but I know they’re all talking about the storm, something about luck, something about a tree falling on a car, something about power lines down.
I close my eyes briefly and remember the way I was scrambling, searching through the wreckage in my dream. I feel the same desperate energy boiling up now, but I have nowhere to direct it. I drum my fingers on my desk, open my email, join in with the dozens of other clacking keyboards.
I know I will think about that woman—lying there, bleeding, the wind howling—all day, probably all week, if I do not distract myself. So I keep busy. I keep as busy as I can keep myself so my eyes are focused elsewhere.
Keeping busy, I think, is the best existence I can give myself.
She said she always liked the paintings better when they were unfinished. When they still had potential. Her mind, it seemed, always filled in the gaps more perfectly than her paintbrush ever could.
The front room held one such unfinished painting of a woman holding a vase. She called it Lilies. When I asked her where the lilies were she pointed to the empty space just above the vase, then to her own head. “It’s bursting with them,” she said.
And I have no doubts that what she saw when she stared at the blank space was immaculate. Still, all I saw was blank space.
“It’s impossible to paint that good,” she told me once, “so I don’t.”
The one time she managed to have her own exhibition, the gallery belonging to her boyfriend’s cousin’s daughter-in-law or something of the sort, there was a pompous write up about non finito pieces and some drivel she probably convinced them to add about the finesse it takes to suggest something without showing it.
Being that I don’t know much about art, I couldn’t tell you how much of it was bull. All I know is she didn’t name the massive, half-empty canvas across from her doorway Suggestion of Lilies. And she didn’t keep it for herself out of some special attachment to this painting in particular, either. She had a huge storeroom full of her “finished” works, in their various states of doneness, that she often rotated out in displays around the house.
She had only ever managed to sell two of her paintings that I was aware of. One she sold to her boyfriend, when they were still in the stages of trying to impress one another, and once she moved in with him he gifted that to his mother, seeing as his house was bound to become overrun with her art anyway. The other she sold to me, back when we were quite young and I felt she might be trying to prove something.
I recall on the day I decided to buy the painting she was asking me whether it was a sin to claim to have vision when it never came to fruition. I found that phrasing odd, the evil in her mind being not a lack of follow-through, but the presence of an idea in the first place. The same backward logic where not getting into the art school she applied to was only a secondary reason for her not going, after her supposedly long-held opinion that studying art in a classroom is frivolous. I was wondering if she was trying to invent for me some new excuse for her flighty attention span when she pulled me by the hand to her studio/bedroom/kitchenette, a tiny box of a living space two units down from mine, and showed me what was on her easel.
She’d been working on it that morning; the paint was still wet. A snow-laden pinecone, or the top of one, and some underpainting. For a moment, I saw what it would have become had she kept working.
“Why start what you will never finish?” I asked her.
She moved her face close to mine, closer than she ought, and said, “Interim has a kind of magic, don’t you think?” Then she turned away to look at the painting. “How nice to stay in a place with possibility.”
And how could I disagree? I offered to buy that painting for the cost of dinner and a pack of the cigarettes she would quit smoking a few months later when she started a short-lived relationship with someone that fussed over her more than I did. Both being of the starving artist variety, the deal was all I could afford and one she was inclined to accept. I walked home holding the painting carefully by its edges. I was overcome by a sort of awe, not of the beauty of the painting but of a glimpse of understanding of the artist.
Of course, it wouldn’t be long before I started wondering whether artist was too generous a term for either one of us. I was freelancing for a lifestyle magazine—shilling feature articles on this beautiful historic home or that trendy DIY piece of decor. Nothing says art like the fortieth installment in a series of identical write-ups from interviews about country living. That’s the kind of writing that teaches you craft and kills creativity. So clean. So mechanical.
I tried to explain this to her once and she told me that’s not the real reason I quit. That I only said so to sound noble. That if it were true, I would’ve at least tried to make what I wanted to after I moved on. She said maybe I was too afraid to write without direction. She said maybe I had been waiting for an excuse to give up altogether.
Which is why, when I stood in front of lily-less Lilies years later and listened to her prattle about what she imagined it to be all the while consumed by thoughts of what it was not, I could not tell her that I knew she was also afraid. Afraid to try things she thought would be difficult.
Your vision of a piece, she told me, is the only thing beyond reproach. Because it is the only part that can never be examined.
She has held in her mind for too long, I think, the idea that she is a great visionary. It is the same idea that overcame me when I first saw the pinecone painting—she is someone capable of greatness; her potential is boundless. Yet she finds herself lacking in the practical skills she could have mastered by now if she had ever tried. And I wonder, would we see her vision by now if she had? How long can she applaud herself for what she has not accomplished?
It was on the tip of my tongue then, but I could already hear her rebuttal: At least I have ideas. And didn’t that make her more than me?
Those days, I kept up my writing the way one does a diet during the holidays. It was something I might be strict with myself over for a day or two, but it was so easy not to be. And so rewarding not to be, as sacrilegious as it might feel to admit that. My degree was built on classes that heavily emphasized creating a writing habit, writing until it becomes an instinct, practically muscle memory. But the thing about writing in those days was that no matter how much I did it, it was dragging. It was a burden. It was flat, frustrating, fruitless. To let it go felt like reprieve. I felt guilty for letting it fall by the wayside after all I’d invested, sure, but I didn’t feel angry at myself the way I did when I was trying. Giving up was indulgence.
“You cannot count on the muse to be upon you,” one professor had told me. “You have to learn to write without it.” But this, it seems, is where I failed. This is the criticism that when asked my opinion on Lilies caused me to pause and remember my place.
Instead of what I would have said to her, I mumbled some halfhearted praise, which she accepted breezily before changing course.
Her boyfriend wanted to get married, she told me.
It was not what I thought I’d come to discuss, but I was not shocked to hear it. Most regarded them as practically married anyway. It had been enough years. But the way she said it—he wants to get married—told me that she was not seeking my congratulations.
I stayed quiet. She seemed to be freshly pondering the idea, as though she hadn’t taken the time to consider it until now. As though I were the one awaiting her answer.
“I might say yes,” she added after a while, finally turning away from her painting to face me.
Then I saw the new course she had given the conversation for what it was: an invitation to talk her out of it. Because, having known her even longer than her boyfriend, having had access to the most intimate of her thoughts for much of that time, I knew what she thought of marriage. Confining. Boring, even. Where was the fun of knowing what the rest of your life would be like? Even if you are going to stay with someone forever, doesn’t taking away the mystery dull it? “Tomorrow I could take off on a train somewhere,” she used to say to me, “and start a new life. Probably, I won’t. But I could.”
I did not tell her what I knew she was thinking, that to say yes contradicted her inflexible stance on flexibility, narrowed her forced-wide view of the future. Truly, on the day when I had bought the painting of the pinecone, I might have told her it was a mistake, being that I was so mesmerized by her thoughts on keeping possibility alive, seeing whatever outcome you wanted to see at any given moment. But I had become less convinced. Sometimes, you have to pick a door and walk through it. I felt I had stood in the lobby with her for too long, staying still while only daydreaming about all of the other rooms we could be exploring. Perhaps I could not criticize her art because I had all but left mine behind, but perhaps that I was moving at all was better than nothing. Perhaps this was what I could tell her.
“What do you think you will do if you say no?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I could do anything at all then.”
“But what will you do?”
She would not answer that. Because she knew as well as I that while she was enchanted by the idea of something dramatic, the fact was she had become comfortable. She knew which door she would take, if anyone had ever once forced her to choose.
“He is a good man,” I said after a brief silence. “And he loves you. And you have built a home together. Are you going to tell me you would leave him—leave all of that?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you going to tell me that you want to leave at least one lure dangling if someone else should bite?”
“I am not worried about attracting a new fish,” she said softly, her tone indicating she wasn’t entirely certain she should. “But marriage is so conclusive, is it not?”
I felt in that moment, almost as if it were more than mere memory, her face nearly touching mine as she told me about the magic of interim, alighting on an idea of something that would be kept alive far past what was reasonable. “What of the things you have left hanging by a thread for so long, you mean?”
She would not answer that either. She turned back to Lilies, sighed. “Whatever happened to the painting you bought from me all those years ago?”
“Hanging in my breakfast nook, above the little pub table.”
“Ah. I see.” She lifted her fingers toward her painting and squinted at a section of it, as though she had just discovered an issue she would rather not have noticed. Scowling, she lowered her hand again. “I haven’t seen it in a while. Back at the apartments, you kept it in the main room.”
“At the apartments the main room was the only room. Anyway, I still have it. Would you like me to bring it next time?”
She shook her head. “Merely making conversation.”
“I was really … quite fond of it. The painting.”
“Yes, I recall.” She showed me something like a smile then, but her eyes kept darting back to the troublesome spot on the canvas.
“It’s getting late.”
That elicited no more than a small hum of agreement. Already lost in her ideas again, I could tell. Somewhere I couldn’t see and somewhere she’d never successfully communicate.
“I brought a bottle of wine for you,” I told her. “In the kitchen. You should drink it. And you should tell him yes, about the marriage. It is not so wrong for things to have an ending.”
The intimacy of saying my name. The intimacy of invoking all of the voices that have spoken it before, all of the meanings they have conveyed when they called it.
My name is not a term of endearment; it is a set of expectations. When you speak it, you add your own. The assumptions you have allowed yourself to make about me and the closeness you feel you’ve earned, can I deny you those things? Can I deny you the familiarity with which you use a word that embodies all of the selves that I am and ever have been, ever should have been? Can I deny you the right to know me well enough to say it when I am the one who opened the gate and let you inside?
I am sorry. I was lonely and you were kind. But I want you to unsee me, un-understand. Watch how I become the world’s largest manufacturer of distances. Watch me take it all back, wind the string. Watch me close myself away. How much more comfortable it is to be miles away, unknown.
An experience, I think, does not need to happen 10 times for you to learn something from it. Once was enough for me. Once has occupied enough space in my brain, still occupies space even after all these years.
Love, however great it felt, was too trusting, too forgiving. Love, however much it gave, always took more. It expected too much of me.
I remember thinking I should not care so much, wondering how to stop. It seems he did not need to wonder. It was there one day and then, the turn of the faucet from which he’d outpoured every sign of affection he’d been capable of. I retained an echo of a warm feeling, a brushing of arms, him tugging on the strings of my hoodie, his breath on my neck. But there was too much frigid air and I was standing exposed to it.
I think you can only love with your whole self, carelessly, once. The child who burns her hand on the stove does not reach out to touch it again. It is one of those hard lessons: some things hurt more than you’d realized they would.
Having learned my lesson, I tried to keep myself safe, guarded. But I did not consider that love could appear in unexpected places. I am burned again, but on a stove belonging to someone else, one that I did not know was turned on. I pull my hand back a fraction of a second too late. I hide the wound. Is it obvious to them, I wonder, and I do not know what I hope the answer is. There is a fear that they would scold me for being in their kitchen. There is a desire that they would welcome me to cook alongside them if I asked, a desire intensely strong, and I am a little afraid of that too.
I do not need to go through it again to know: love makes you vulnerable; it takes advantage of your weak spots. I feel conspicuous, exposed, transparent in all the worst ways.
An experience does not need to happen 10 times, I think, for you to be able to guess what’s to come of it. I did not mean to walk up to the stove. I didn’t even mean to cross the line into the kitchen. I knew enough, at least, to cover up the evidence. I have learned the hard way to hold something back. And still, despite the lessons once learned, there is still too much feeling here, too much slipping through the cracks. There is something new occupying the space in my brain, pushing its way back in each time I cast it aside.
It’s closing the book with 20 pages left so you have something to look forward to.
It’s taking in a view. Taking in your jeans, taking them back out again. Taking in a stranger you met online so you can pay rent.
It’s always meeting new people you will have to say goodbye to. It’s finding those people you won't want to say goodbye to. It’s saying goodbye to people before you’re ready.
It’s making big plans, small ones, plans with yourself that you promise to keep. It’s keeping your promises.
It’s not asking too many questions, or maybe just learning which ones to ask. Always asking what comes next, but not why. It’s ignoring the concept of purpose while hoping one manifests itself.
It’s taking up painting and being very, very bad at it. It’s quitting when you’ve hardly begun. It’s a couple of smears on a canvas that no one would consider it a great loss to paint over. But they are there, and you know they are there, and maybe wanting more than that is vanity.
It’s not asking for more. It’s drinking a glass of water when you are thirsty and having another when you’re not. It’s a series of motions you repeat, and it should be plenty.
It’s a blank page, or one written in invisible ink, or one with traceable lines and you are a crayon in the fist of a four-year-old learning to write the alphabet. It vaguely resembles the plan. It’s the best you could do.
In the kitchen over breakfast, my dad tells me about the dream he had.
He’d bought a kite and was flying it for the first time at the park next to his house. It was windy and he was running, running, running, hardly even looking where he was going. Then he saw me across the way, waving my arms and yelling to him. When he got closer, he heard that it was a warning. His kite was going to fly into the telephone lines. But he realized too late. His brand-new kite got stuck.
He asks me what it could mean, and though I tell him I don’t believe in things like that, I think for a long time. I think about how often my dad steers good things toward disaster, how unaware he is of what all of the rest of us see. I think about how little good it does to warn him. I think about him always asking, but never wanting to know, what I really think.
That night, I dream that we are back in that same park, this time flying kites side-by-side. His is torn. I can see that it is going to crash, but our strings are twisted together and it’s bringing mine down with it. I try to pull away. Try to explain that we need to untangle. My dad is yelling louder than I can ever speak. I don’t hear the sound of my own voice, drowned out by a reminder of who bought me the kite to begin with. Suddenly, I am certain that if I keep fighting with it, the string is going to snap. I wake up knowing that I would have let the kite fall to the ground instead.
