Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

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.

“Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,”

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.

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.

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?’