Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

What I didn’t see was that the time had severe brackets around it.

Within those brackets nothing else existed. Outside of them, all you could remember was the blur of a momentary madness. Ninety percent of us wouldn’t even put it on a résumé. We might mention it as a tossed-off reference to our moral rigor, a badge of a certain kind of misery, like enduring earthquakes, or spending time in the army. It was so finite.

But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting.

Yes, I’d come to escape, but from what?

The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn’t matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitively forward.

all around me ambivalent evidence of extinction.

Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in.

They all said that when they walked in, it felt like coming home.

I’m stopping here to become someone else.

Maybe he knew how I fantasized about living a twenty-four-hour life. Maybe he knew how bored I had been up until now.

“It says here you were an English major.” “Yes. I know. It’s generic.” “What are you reading?” “Reading?” “What are you reading right now?” “Is that a job question?” “Perhaps.” He smiled. His eyes made an unabashed, slow circle around my face. “Um. Nothing. For the first time in my life, I’m reading nothing.”

“Yes. It’s startling to look back on the passionate epiphanies of our youth. But a good sign perhaps. That our minds have changed, that we’ve evolved.”

“Or maybe it means we’ve forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that’s the big grown-up secret to survival.”

My palms were damp. That was the moment I realized I wanted the job. That job, at that restaurant

“It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”

I was never good at the future.

I had visions, too abstract and flat for me to hang on to. For years I saw a generic city lit up at night.

One day I was quitting my job with no sense of exhilaration, one day I was leaving a note for my father, pulling out of his driveway, slightly bewildered, and two days later I was sitting in front of Howard. That was the way the future came to me.

She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.

Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”

He shook my hand and nodded like he had already forgiven me for all my shortcomings and would remember my face forever.

“We are creating the world as it should be. We don’t have to pay any attention to how it is.”

Maybe I had never actually made a mistake before in my life and this is what it felt like. Like your hands were slipping off of every facet, like you didn’t have the words or directions and even gravity wasn’t reliable.

This is Me: • Unfailingly optimistic: doesn’t let the world get him or her down. • Insatiably curious: and humble enough to ask questions. • Precise: there are no shortcuts. • Compassionate: has a core of emotional intelligence. • Honest: not just with others, but most essentially with oneself.

“The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”

I would tell him that for so long I thought I would be nothing; that my loneliness had been so total that I was unable to project into the future.

“Do you see how, up close, it’s blurry and passionate? And from a distance, whole?”

The sky was like the paintings. No, the paintings were trying to represent this sunset.

The sky was aflame and throwing sparks, the orange clouds rimmed with purple like ash.

So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.

“It’s how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives.

The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”

My body shone in the distressed streetlight. I was used to being alone. But I’d never been aware of so many other people, also alone. I knew that all over the south side of Williamsburg people were staring at their ceilings, praying for a breeze to come and cure them, and like that I lost myself. I evaporated.

It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don’t want to give. It’s like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.

“What does that mean?” “I don’t know. You give off this runaway vibe, like you’re all huddled up inside yourself.”

Will’s eyes became concerned and I thought, Don’t do that. That’s not why I told you. It’s not something to fix.

grasping, runny eyes, the kind of eyes that take in everything and have no defenses. I knew how badly he needed a friend.

YOU WILL STUMBLE on secrets.

The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don’t know what you don’t know. But you can intuit it while holding yourself on the skin of the water, treading above deep pockets, faint voices underneath you.

“No one is interested in you playing the victim. Get out of your head. If you don’t you’ll always be disappointed. Pay attention.”

I wasn’t a victim. I hadn’t been led anywhere. I had chosen this overgrown, murky path where I couldn’t see five feet in front of me—the drugs, the drinking until black, the embarrassment, the confusion. But really I had chosen the two of them—they were the difficult terrain. I understood what she meant by “let it go.” I didn’t have to quit my job. There had been another route open to me this entire time—a well-lit, well-laid, honest path. I said to myself, Turn around. You do not have to take every experience on the pulse.

That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary.

YOU WILL SEE it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.

When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young.

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

Mocking and cruel, as if he knew that I didn’t want to be here again, in a cycle of nothing nights.

She hadn’t made a choice. Someone else had.

The cocaine was an illumination, the bathroom florid, filtered. When I looked at our reflection in the mirror we looked like a photograph. I could see that we were just playing. The degree to which I took myself seriously was laughable.

We didn’t fully have faith that it was coming but we had no choice but to move forward into the protracted promises.