What It's Like in Words: A Novel

by Eliza Moss

I thought about how it felt when he smiled at me, or rather, how it felt to be the person he had chosen to smile at.

But it doesn’t matter whether I remember only the good or only the bad or if I get as close to objectivity as it is possible to get, because the truth is: I wanted him.

I didn’t recognize myself, but I still felt seen.

I hid the parts of myself that I didn’t like and sometimes I wondered how much of me was left visible after that.

Enola, why are you staring at me? Because I love you and because being with you is like carrying something fragile.

The other night I was beautiful and special, and now I was a nightmare. Why was I ruining this? And why, when he left a room, did it still feel like I might never see him again?

But to write, you couldn’t curate pieces of yourself—you had to bleed, you had to show the ugly parts, the parts scarred and darkened by the sun. Editing might be order, but writing had to be chaos.

Like magic, my anger and frustration vanished, and all that was left was incapacitating fear. Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.

But tonight he didn’t say anything, and I felt like the punch line of the same joke.

If universes sprout from moments of indecision, then I have created hundreds.

When he got into bed, I clung to his arm like I was going into space. He didn’t try to have sex with me. He never wanted to have sex anymore. He had seen my ugly pieces: the mess, the tears, the violence. But he kissed the back of my neck, and I held my pain as if it were a balloon that might pop. His breathing changed, and I was left alone in the dark with my balloon. I just had to keep him happy. He would stay with me as long as I made him happy.

I remember his words to me: Because you’re happier being miserable. Why is it that not being happy with them must mean that you’re not capable of happiness? I’m not happier being miserable. No one is happy being miserable.

Maybe the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is just different drafts of the same story.

The more that Ruth and I talk, the more I think that home isn’t anything real, not a place or a building or a person; it’s just a sense of something, an inaccessible realm of playing in the grass and being called in for tea, of a towel held out after a bath and ice cream dripping on bare toes.