Definitely Better Now

by Ava Robinson

I was terrible at speaking from the heart. My heart was shy. It didn’t like crowds.

Your worst fear is suddenly funny when someone is holding your hand.

“And then, well, marry someone who brings out the best in you.” “That’s what everyone says.” “Okay, think about it this way. When you’re with someone, if you like yourself, then they’re good for you. If you don’t like yourself, then they’re not. I think it’s that simple.”

Men respected other men’s claims on a woman infinitely more than they respected a woman’s decision not to sleep with them.

but he looked at me like I could say anything and he’d believe me. Like he’d pick up a sword and run into danger if I asked him to. It was a heady power, one that excited and terrified me in equal measure.

Ben: I can cook for you. Emma: At your place? Ben: Of course at my place. This weekend? Emma: Will you put out candlesticks and everything? Ben: If you want candlesticks, I’ll get you candlesticks.

After a few hours of pacing around and listening to Taylor Swift while I cried, Ben texted me.

“Emma.” He paused as if giving me one last chance to say it myself. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t tolerate being wrong. “I nominated myself after Jermaine nominated you.”

“Is that too weird?” he asked. “Should I have kept it to myself? I thought it was obvious. It wasn’t like I thought about it beforehand—I heard your name and then my own popped out. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You were so funny, and cute, and beautiful.” He was rambling.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

He reached for my shoulders, forcing me to look at him. And I could tell he was being earnest. He didn’t want me to leave. But he didn’t know. If he kept waiting for me, he’d be waiting forever. I was never going to be normal.

“It’s okay. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s okay,” he said.

But I also wanted to be a shiny new person. I had no attachments to my defects, I didn’t want to feel jealous, or lonely, or afraid. I wanted to feel whole, perfect. I wanted to be like the girls I watched fall in love and get married and have babies and live a normal fearless life. I didn’t want to be famous or rich or important, I just wanted to be able to feel my skin against my body and not want to tear it off.

It wasn’t lost on me that my father had made the situation worse by not telling me something and that I went and did the same exact thing. Like father, like daughter, through and through.

I wanted to be as normal, as perfect, as I could be. But instead, I bottled things up, panicked, and then exploded, hurting you in the process.” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“You can be nostalgic for things you haven’t lived through. As long as it speaks to an essential part of you.”

“You can’t choose your family, and you can’t choose your baseball team. Not really.”

Gaura, Dad, and I lived in the Kingston Hospice Center for five days. Two of us walked out.

“You’d just say ‘It would mean so much if you could make it.’ It’s scary, I know. Of course it’s scary. But it gets easier every time you invite someone in.”

Sometimes it can feel like disloyalty, letting go of past versions of yourself. Even though I’d changed so much about myself, even though I’d worked so hard for it, I still wasn’t sure who I was going to be or what exactly I was working toward.

These boxes in front of me told a story of an unsatisfied man, one searching for something he couldn’t name. He didn’t find it in AA, or in mushrooms, or even in meditation. But he’d tried. How had I not seen it before?

I felt sure I could make it through whatever I had to make it through. That we all could, every single one of us in this room.

“Now I feel like I can’t be sober just because he was drunk. I have to be sober because I want to be sober. Because my life is better when I don’t drink. Maybe it’s that simple—or at least just for today, it feels that simple.”

The usual pang of jealousy that gripped me when I wished for another family didn’t come and didn’t infect my voice. I’d meant what I said. Holding one person close for all those years? It might not have happened in my family, but the fact that it happened anywhere made me feel a little more hopeful.

It didn’t feel like my final goodbye to Dad. I’d be saying goodbye and hello to him all my life.

If I only have so many breaths, I want to take each one with intention.”

Our eyes met, and I felt like I did when I wrapped my arms around him in the temple parking lot: so glad he was here, that he was with me, and that it was him holding my heart.

It would be fine. It was actually, in fact, already fine.

us. I imagined us living out our lives in a Park Slope brownstone, or a remote cabin in the woods, or even a South Florida retirement community, and they all felt strange. But wonderful and absolutely possible.