Margo's Got Money Troubles

by Rufi Thorpe

You aren’t trying to have a relationship with the character. You are trying to have a relationship with the author through the character.”

I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind’s eye.

The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.

But good or evil, every single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.

Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.

Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.