Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise.

“Definitely wine. And maybe new shoes.” Have I mentioned that it’s morning when this happens? On a weekday? This isn’t one of those nightclub farmers’ markets. And the women aren’t the kinds of beleaguered, downtrodden creatures you imagine drinking to get through the day. They’re pretty cool chicks, the kind people ridicule for having First World Problems. Why do they need to drink? Because cool chicks are still women. And there’s no easy way to be a woman, because there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe you drink a little. Or a lot.

don’t mention how she’ll have to work around interruptions and invisibility and micro-aggressions and a scarcity of role models and a lifetime of her own conditioning.

But she’s a woman. She probably learned to read between the lines before she could read the lines themselves. She thanks me and sits down.

blame that bitch for a lot. For spreading the notion that women should have a career, keep house, and fuck their husbands, when the only sane thing to do is pick two and outsource the third. For making it seem glamorous.

Nothing in life is all one way. I laugh my ass off three times during a movie that otherwise has me checking my watch. I have sex when I don’t really feel like it, thinking maybe I’ll get interested midway, but I’d still rather be reading.

It’s maddening how subtle life is. And it’s frustrating how much I want to engineer it into drama. There is nothing so absorbing or high stakes or pleasurable that I won’t try to alter my natural response to it. Only it’s hard to do that without wine, and I’m too tired to find another route. So I trudge along doing things that are a little bit boring and a little bit fun and a little bit beautiful until my sense of scale starts to match reality.

No, wait: fat is beautiful. No, wait: thin is beautiful, too, as long as you don’t work for it. No, wait: All women are beautiful! As if we are toddlers who must be given exactly equal shares of princess dust or we’ll lose our shit.

I’m burning with clarity, and I want all of womankind to burn with me so we can incinerate the patriarchy just by existing.

It will have dawned on me that there are women in the world who can have a glass of wine without craving the whole bottle. That some women even leave wine in the glass, a concept as alien to me as eating half an Oreo.

We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.

It is so nice on this end of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. Sober. I never expected to make it to this end of the pool. I never thought I’d get to be here.

You do not have to use “journal” as a verb. You do not have to look in the mirror and say you love yourself. You do not have to love yourself. Not today.

You do not have to read good books. You do not have to improve your mind. You could read about Jennifer Aniston, who is either pregnant or not. Imagine being Jennifer Aniston, standing in line to buy an açai bowl and seeing a headline saying you’re pregnant but it still won’t be enough to win back Brad. Think of the dignity it takes to be Jennifer Aniston. No wonder she is so taut. She is holding in the fury of all womankind. You could think of this, but not for long, because you might find yourself forming an army to defend her. And you do not have time for causes.

My stress over, say, a playground snub could provoke an equal reaction in my mother that both justified my worry and added to it; the fear that there were no calm adults around to help me or make me feel better just made me more anxious, which spun my mom up even more.

No one needs to know the whole story of who I think I am.

I had a hopeful, sheepish relationship to crafting stores.

And all my new supplies would go into the linen closet among the sheets and beach towels, to the shelf reserved for optimistic variations of myself that rarely surfaced.

Because I didn’t want to stop drinking. I wanted to stop wanting to drink. Because then the stopping itself would be as easy as avoiding spin class or olives or pointy-toed shoes or Ryan Reynolds movies or anything else I didn’t like.

something in me said, “Okay. Okay, I get it.” Suddenly I understood that what I wanted was no longer important. I would just have to wait and hope that eventually I would want something else.

I’m a tourist: I came to see what futility looks like and how people go on once they’ve figured out there’s no point to going on.

All that effort, just to die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life. That I wouldn’t have to pay close attention to every root and rock on the path in front of me. That I’d be sure-footed enough to also notice the trees and the wind and even the occasional owl and to realize that both time and space were far denser than I ever knew.

It’s still mildly shocking to me that my body can take on the pain of running and the pain of my thoughts and thrive. Maybe all those years I was waiting for it to fall apart, it just needed a job to do.

am not a joiner. Worse, I’m a leaver. I love that rush of front-porch vacuum quiet when the door to a party shuts behind me. I love leaving group dinners just before someone orders dessert and drags out the whole godforsaken thing another thirty minutes. I’ve been known to get to the intermission of a play and say, “Well, I think I’ve got the gist of it by now.” There’s only so much I can take of you people and your celebrations and that thing where you want me in your life. It’s a lot, okay?

It is the road less traveled. And once you’re already on that road, the side paths look more like trampled vegetation than anything officially sanctioned. Land planners call them desire lines, which is a kind way to say The places we didn’t think it made any goddamn sense to walk. That’s where you can find me, if you want. And if you don’t want, that’s fine, too. I don’t really want to hang out with you anyway.

Being the Only Woman at the Table means spending a lot of time trying to talk, because there are mere microseconds between one man finishing his thought and the next one jumping in and no one bothers to read nonverbal cues, or talking and seeing half the room choose that moment to look at their phones. It means being interrupted over and over until you either give up or resort to saying “Can I please finish my thought?” like a prig who can’t just roll with the discussion. Or, finally expressing a whole thought and having the conversation pick back up as though you hadn’t said a word.

I’ve been advised to take a lot of strange behavior as a compliment. When a boy shoved me on the playground, it meant he liked me. When guys dumped me, it meant they knew I was way too good for them. When men talk over me in meetings, it’s because they’re threatened by my intellect; when they catcall me in the park, it’s because I’ve still got it. I’ve been surfing a wave of male aggression all my life.

I’d like to say this was the last time I confused pickled self-destruction with

Summer in Seattle is an experience of collective hypomania, three months when the entire city tries to cram in as much activity as possible before the light disappears again. Our daylight, which ends by 4:00 p.m. in December, stretches until after 10:00 in July. The mist dries up, and the temperature rises to our upper-tolerable limit of seventy-seven degrees. Like nineteenth-century Austrians, we take the air to cure ourselves of the damage seasonal affective disorder has done to our minds and hearts.

the land of evergreens and grunge and no free parking, ever.

bought a coffee mug that said, “Bloom Where You’re Planted,” and every time I filled it, I translated it for myself as Jesus Christ, can you just be happy for once?

whether I’ll ever be at peace with how these dark, wet winters dampen my mood. Where’s my daily epiphany? Where is the random sign that will tell me if my aim is true? Where’s the sense? None of those things will be available—not that day, not on call, no matter how much I want them. And I really do.

I want to find the perfectly absorbing job, to accept all weather with stolid good cheer, to have a kitchen full of copper pots and blue roses. I want happiness.

But moping in that Seattle café, I will know that at least I’m pursuing happiness in a way that works. Mostly. And I will have figured out that sometimes pursuit just means paying close attentio...

All Seattleites get like this by March, our fifth straight sunless month. Has my career peaked already? Does anyone really love me? Can my body still process vitamin D?

It doesn’t take willpower to avoid the thing that is sure to ruin my life; it just takes a fierce, overriding desire to not ruin my life.