What It's Like in Words: A Novel

by Eliza Moss

The difference a smile made to skin was paper being folded and unfolded. The deep lines lifted as if by fishing line and he had, at once, the warmest face I had ever seen.

I read this thing that said butterflies are our body’s fight-or-flight. We think they mean love or attraction or whatever, but they actually mean danger. It’s your body warning you to run.

Everything here is mine. The beaded cushions on the sofa. The vase on the table. The color-coded books in the bookshelf. I chose them. I paid for them. I placed them. This was my space. My home. But then he made fun of my cushions, he bought me flowers for that vase, he teased me about the books in the bookshelf. Now everything mine has become his, and I’m not sure when or how that happened. Amy’s house is full of photographs of her and David, but I don’t have any photographs of us, so our memories are in the items. I thought that made the relationship more intimate, but Ruth said it was because he never viewed it as a real relationship. And yet, if the police dusted, they would find his prints everywhere.

I would tell him what I wanted over time, and my fake orgasms would seamlessly transform into real ones.

Roo, he’s here. I’ll call you later. Okay. Have fun. Remember that I loved you when you cut your own fringe.

Being with him was exhilarating. There were challenging parts; he was blunt and occasionally rude, and he wielded humor both as a weapon and a shield. But I felt happy, in that fizzy way you feel as a child jumping in a lake or seeing snow for the first time.

my feminist guilt sunk to the place where I kept the other hidden things.

I would rather that people had an opinion than think he was just nice. I worried that people thought that about me, because it took me longer to reveal the colors of myself, which he and Ruth and even Amy offered confidently. I was still curating pieces for him. The “funny” piece. The “sexy” piece. The “sweet” piece.

You’re all ice queen by day and sparrow by night. I didn’t recognize myself, but I still felt seen.

For the first time, this felt like a mistake, and more than anything, I wished that Ruth were here. I was going back to Kenya with a man who didn’t know that I didn’t like whiskey or that I faked more orgasms than I had; who didn’t know that I was only pretending to write my novel when he was writing his, and who didn’t know the truth: that I was desperately, painfully, consumingly in love with him.

I would have cut my own arm so that he could heal the wound.

I had never felt sexy before, but I believed him because, at this point, I was what he told me.

I didn’t think about my pleasure because it wasn’t my pleasure I was addicted to.

And then it hit me: writing was never about control, it was about losing it. That was why I hadn’t been able to finish anything.

I wanted to make it flawless and perfect and correct. 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.

It shouldn’t make him feel less to see you thrive.

I just had to keep him happy. He would stay with me as long as I made him happy.

Why haven’t you sent your manuscript to that agent yet? I felt conflicted then, because I should have sent it off. I should have finished it. But every time I opened my laptop, I thought about him. He was working so hard. He had always wanted to be a writer. He should have this opportunity, but I did, and I knew how he felt about that. I wasn’t meaning to hold myself back but I just kept thinking if he could only finish his book first so that I could finish that little bit behind him …

I was trading my body for the hope of his heart, and he was saying yes to a cup of tea that he didn’t really want because someone else was making it.

I had wanted this so badly. His body. His hands. His smell. But what was it that I actually wanted? Because the sex was never good, was it? It was just a period of time where I had him. It was addictive. It was control. But he didn’t want me and he wasn’t even pretending to.

But this truce between me and him lasted only as long as we kept everything sweet. Nothing real could survive.

Twenty years since he died. Twenty-three years since he stubbed his toe on the sofa. Twenty-seven years since he burned the toast. It all hurts.

I loved him more than I had ever loved anything. I wanted nothing but him. His smell covering my skin. His pulse under my hands. I wanted to swallow him, to drink him, to absorb him until I was more him than me. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to reassure him. I wanted to please him. I wanted to serve him. I wanted to love him. I wanted to beg him to love me. But there was nothing else to do. No new depths. No new tricks. No new tool for worship. Before I could talk myself out of it, the words formed like mud. I love you.

And, Enola, the thing is, sometimes the good bits of people aren’t the rule, they’re the exception.

I was just too nice for her. It’s a clever weapon, really, because it’s such an innocuous word: “nice.” Nice guys deserve girlfriends. Nice guys are entitled to girlfriends. Nice guys earn girlfriends. Nice isn’t a personality trait or a characteristic; it’s an adjective for a tablecloth. It’s the bare minimum. It’s what women have to be or they’ll be called a bitch.

I stood wondering if other people found it this hard to understand themselves, and then made a cup of tea.

I asked her if she thought that I was a sociopath because I didn’t feel bad, and she said that sociopaths didn’t worry about being sociopaths.

There he was, and I immediately existed in all the same ways as before.

It’s strange, but I always assumed it would feel like a victory when he said those words to me, like his love was a trophy I could win by running faster than everyone else. But now that he has said them, they sound unnatural, and I’m angry that he would be so reckless with my heart that he would fight to change my feelings knowing that his own might have changed by morning.

People are people. They’re not things you can pick up and put down.