Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

she’s forced to choose between self-respect and peace of mind, when each requires the other, so it is a choice between nothing and nothing.

She clenches her eyelids and presses her fists into her temples, as if to physically crush this false conviction that Neil is in some way realer than everyone else, that he is somehow the axis of her life and the only one who can “save” her and his opinion of her constitutes her entire worth, having staked exclusive mining rights to her happiness, because of the irreplicable circumstances of how they knew each other, when at the bottommost level of truth she knows he’s just . . . another . . . fucking . . . guy.