I Can Be a Better You

by Tarryn Fisher

Assume there’s a stranger following you home in a very clean, inconspicuous white SUV, assume you’re raising a narcissist, assume in twenty years your kid will hate you because you didn’t set up enough boundaries.

Why was I always assuring people that I wasn’t crazy? Was it because they were all so normal, so boring?

There were three things that drew women into a hungry-eyed cluster: liquor, men, and gossip.

When you live in your own head all the time, things contort. You have to voice your thoughts so you can know you’re not the only one who’s fucked up. It makes a big difference to know that.”

Marriage was nothing but a lot of dirty dishes and pee sprinkled on your toilet seat.

My professor, an ex-nun, would often speak about the written word having rhythm and beat. I found myself enraptured by Jolene’s use of words, the staccato sentences blended with a rhythm that flowed so easily you just kept reading as to not disrupt it.

I felt depressed. I wandered over to the fridge, my go-to place when my mood took a downer. Therapy in brightly colored packages, filled with ingredients that went straight to my hips.

“Where did you get that?” I asked her. “Incidentally, the Space Needle,” she said. “Why? You gonna buy one too?” “Not my style,” I tossed back. “It’s a little kitschy.” Darius choked on his drink. I hadn’t meant to say it. Sometimes that just happened to me and I blurted things out—I had no filter, George always said.

Haha 😂

A woman’s heart was an awful curse. She’d take him back, but probably remind him of his failure for the rest of his life. That was the nature of forgiveness. It came with a price.

“Humans are monogamous creatures. We stray when our happiness is threatened. Happiness is tied to survival. We feel as if we are failing if we aren’t happy, especially when we open any social media panel and see our friends hashtagging all the good things in their lives. It’s all fake. We are all more in limbo than we are happy.”

I was a glutton for life. A whore for venture. I wanted to cut open my skull and pour experiences into it—good ones, bad ones, heck, even the meekly mediocre ones would do. I didn’t want to live them all, living gets messy and exhausting, and let’s face it, I still had a fucking job.

As Jolene always said, you couldn’t put three crazy people into a story and not have their worlds teeter-totter.

We were products of our earliest experiences, replicating the ways we were taught to love, and fuck, and interact with humanity. Some of us broke free of our pasts; some of us weren’t that clever.

Darius manipulated people’s minds, and I manipulated words, and so the two of us could not manipulate each other. It canceled out. I still loved him. Deeply. How can you love someone who, in their essence, was a miserable, destructive wretch? We love ourselves, don’t we? We’re obsessed with ourselves, in fact. No? What you hate you also value. If you ever doubt me, time your self-hate. You spend ninety percent of your time finding new things to hate yourself for. Obsession.

I wondered if someone who had fire in their soul would have smoke coming out of their mouth.

People can smell kindness on you even when you act like an asshole to scare them away.

“Nope, it’s not actually that large. No. You’re going to have to stop being so goddamn stupid—do you hear me? She wants your life. She’s even pretending to have it to your local dental health specialist. Wake up, Jo.”

Sometimes you get this gut feeling that something is wrong. It sits in your belly like a sack of hard rocks. You can’t forget it’s there, yet you sort of learn to live with it at the same time. You still don’t want to be right. You’d rather tell yourself you’re crazy, become an alcoholic, cry yourself to sleep every night. Anything but face the truth … that you are right. That he is indeed cheating. Since when did it become easier to be crazy than cheated on, you know? It’s just nicer to be crazy than to be unloved.

I’d never tell someone not to text me because I was in a relationship, but I wouldn’t text someone who was. I liked women too much to mess with their men.

That’s what happened when your heart broke. You remembered the good things first. The thing you’d miss. Then when the anger set in, a new reel started to play. Your thoughts turned from a romantic comedy to a psychological suspense.

“You have something worse than the worship gene, Fig.” Her sharp, little shoulders were bunched up, her eyes on my face. “It’s called the crazy gene. You can buy all my clothes, and eat at the same restaurants, you can rub my perfume behind your ears, hell, you can even fuck my husband, but at the end of the day, you’re still you. And that is the absolute worst punishment I can imagine. Average, desperate, unhappy you.”

Oooft

All these months I’d been fucking one enemy and trying to save the other.

I could see why the Terrible One chose a different form of revenge. Something more lasting than a black eye, yes? I can make you a part of something great and beautiful and still portray you as the ugly thing you are.