Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

He was good at engineering ambiguities. I was bad at avoiding them.

With my college brain on, I knew many more people lost their jobs when banks like Julian’s played subprime roulette—but the college brain came with a dial. I turned it up for people I hated, and down for people I liked.

That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.

Tall, I thought, and empty: houses were like their owners.

I felt all your copulative leanings were meant to reveal something deep about you, and if they didn’t you had an uncompelling mind.

He’d been clear that he liked having me around but didn’t want anything serious. His honesty hurt my pride, so I told myself he was a liar.

it wasn’t reciprocation I was craving. My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathize with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

Alternatively, you were well-meaning albeit imperfect humans with uncommonly scarce emotional resources at their disposal.

You knew if you told him any of this he’d understand just enough to break his heart, but seeing how little he could comprehend before it broke him would break you, too. You were ironical with him, also with yourself. It was wild.

After seven consecutive angry faces, I deleted the app. I did not need that negativity in my life.

If the Irish didn’t aspirate and the English did then they were right, but if we did and the English didn’t then they were still right. The English taught us English to teach us they were right.

he seemed to find it easier to express himself behind a screen.

Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was.

She said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.

Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something. You could never tell what those women felt themselves, besides: I want to help this man. I’d never met anyone like that in real life.

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.

She felt it had been easy at Cambridge to claim we should take unfeminist spaces and reform them. Harder in real life, she found.

Undoubtedly he told himself he’d do something once he had the power—and when he got there, he’d wonder where all the women had gone.

I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.

I also feared that she’d stop being friends with me. I thought that about Julian, too, and about anyone in my life who had ever remotely cared about me,

We agreed also that the British obsession with dogs was creepy, both because of the volume of other animals they ate and in light of their historic and contemporary level of regard for humans.

“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 loved Edith so much it seemed only sensible to worry about losing her. You could hardly stake that much in someone and not think every now and then of what you’d do without them.

Women took care of men and let them pretend we didn’t.

the main reason you hate me, when you do, is that you’re terrified of vulnerability. This is so both because others have been unkind to you in the past, and because you don’t like yourself and are sure anyone who gets close will agree. That’s what makes people afraid to offer you intimacy. They know you’ll reject it. You broke up with the love of your life because you saw how much power they had to hurt you.

“Mam,” I said, “have you ever been afraid to say sorry?” She said yes. If you weren’t afraid then you probably weren’t sorry.

Actually, I’d find it impossible, picking only three things. Probably I love all of you. And I think for me that means I want to be with you forever.”