Whoever You Are, Honey

by Olivia Gatwood

She understood the importance of abandoning a place that no longer wants you, before it develops the gumption to drive you out.

It was this tiny, nagging voice that wondered if she liked her life now because it suited her, or because she had to like it in order to survive.

Mitty had studied the lives of other people for long enough to know that something about her own was off-kilter, cluttered and tense and awake at odd hours. She knew it was hopeless to try and embody whatever intrinsic ease those girls seemed to carry around so thoughtlessly with one another. It was all too foreign to her. And even if she did attempt to pinpoint exactly what it was about her life that felt wrong, she couldn’t. She had been inside it for too long. —

It was rare to find that in a man, she thought, someone who doesn’t feel threatened by all the things you could become.

Whoever you are, honey, the television blares, I could love you to pieces.

Bethel always says beautiful women are lonely. Not that they are alone, but that their loneliness is somewhere out of view, in the depths of their psyche, a gorgeous melancholy reserved for people too special to feel part of the world around them.

“Sometimes, I spend so much time alone that I start feeling like my identity is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite name it.” Mitty wants to tell Lena that she feels that way about her entire life. That she’s spent so much time removed from others, with only her thoughts; that sometimes when she leaves the house, she has to remind herself of her personality; that the first few minutes of every interaction is simply an act of working out the kinks of being a human.