Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

‘You still haven’t told me if you like girls,’ she said. I said: ‘There’s lots of things I don’t tell people.’

They filled themselves with a little bit of everyone’s approval, whereas I was more discerning. When I met someone I liked, I wanted all of them, and fast.

There was no limit to what I would trawl through online, and clearly none on the information I would hide from Edith, but I wouldn’t make up a person. That was my moral purlieu. Coincidentally, bringing up a girlfriend would take courage, whereas cyberstalking was easy.

I’d said I was hers from how I looked at her – not from how I’d chosen to look at her, but from how I couldn’t help looking at her – but that didn’t mean she could tell.

‘You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special – which is fair, who doesn’t – but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.’

I felt like abandoning everything else I did to try to be happy, and just spending the rest of my life finding things Edith needed to be told, and telling her.

Her hair was a thick black brush on my pillow. It occurred to me that most beds did not come with a particular Edith, that actually most people had no Edith at all, and that those people had to sleep in those beds or other relevant furniture and pretend to be happy.

i broke up with you because you threatened to break up with me. i felt your power and wanted to feel my own. i did. it worked. i hate it.