Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination.

I yearned for that brief, sharp feeling I get when I drink it – a sad, burning feeling – and then, blissfully, no feelings at all.

like the chicken that had laid the eggs for my sandwich, I was more of a free-range creature.

A buffet. In a golf club. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.

It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones. Beyond understanding.

What, I wondered, was the point of me? I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either. When I ceased to exist, it would make no material difference to anyone. Most people’s absence from the world would be felt on a personal level by at least a handful of people. I, however, had no one.

I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive.

These days, loneliness is the new cancer – a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.

Another bad sign – someone or something had turned vodka into water. This was not my preferred kind of miracle.

Noticing details, that was good. Tiny slivers of life – they all added up and helped you to feel that you, too, could be a fragment, a little piece of humanity who usefully filled a space, however minuscule.