Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore.

wonder if that’s part of the reason I don’t miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I’m starting to forget.

Luke takes my hand and tugs me to sit on the bed with him. There’s a dead spider on the blanket whose legs look woven into the wool. He would like that. It would probably end up in a poem. I take pleasure in not showing it to him.

All the stuffing seems to have gone out of her since. She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel’s colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men.

‘I’m trying to ask you out.’ But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

‘He always uses the word “sour.” ’ ‘Sour?’ ‘It’s just something I’ve noticed. Usually pertaining to the woman: sour breath, sour skin. Something is always sour. It’s like a tic he has.’ She is laughing hard at the expression on my face.

i had the same face too casey

I decide not to tell Silas I’ve finished it. I don’t want to sound braggy. ‘What’ve you been up to?’ I scan my life since he left town: Bad moles. Burnt cervix. Oscar. ‘I finished my novel.’ It’s all I got.

I’m in the mood to call my mother, that happy, shift in the wind mood. I calculate the time in Phoenix. Nearly noon. Perfect. The bolt retracts, and I remember she died.

ugh my heart

I’m done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don’t know or can’t tell you what they want. I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

mhm mhm!

Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time. My father peered through a hole at girls, possibly at me, in our locker room. And when he got caught, he got a party and a cake.

This is not nothing.’ Of all his strange responses, this is the one that helps me the most. This is not nothing.