Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

Maybe the thrill of the relationship was the languages, that everything was heightened for me because of it, more of a challenge, as I tried to maintain his belief in my facility with languages, my ability to absorb, mimic, morph. It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.

I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.

It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

The plants all seem satisfied, thriving, and it makes you feel that way, too, or at least that thriving is a possibility.

men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

in that story ‘The Letter Writers’ about a man and a woman who fall in love through ten years of correspondence, and when they meet their bodies can’t catch up to their words.

Success rests more easily on men.

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 the toasts reveal everything: the rancor between the two families, the promiscuity, the unrequited loves, the bad behavior, the last-minute confessions—all delivered in drunken tangents that end with saccharine platitudes. The rites of marriage are an expensive and dreary business.

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.

Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher’s prophesy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. 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.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

I think of Holden Caulfield, wanting to catch children before they fall off the cliff, and I get it now.

So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’