Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

I wanted people to know we were together, but only the ones who wouldn’t hurt us for it.

Since I’d started visiting when Julian left, Miles seemed to be dropping in more snippets of their family life. It felt unfair that this was happening only now that my top priority was not finding out more about Julian.

But even if everyone else did the same things Edith and I did on dates, I decided it was still special for us.

“So what should Jesus have done?” I said. “Since getting crucified is beta carry-on.” “Ideally, he’d have founded a start-up.”

Mam’s dad died when I was six. Like any number of men in our family, he’d been an alcoholic. You had to be careful of that, Mam said. I couldn’t tell if she meant men should be careful of drink or we should be careful of them.

but really I found the whole thing comforting. I was less responsible for what I said if I’d soaked it up from other people. If someone said something to hurt me, it wasn’t because they meant to, but because they’d surrounded themselves with unkind people in the past.

was pleased with myself for knowing things like that. It wasn’t just famous people either. I’d provide the verb for what you did with a knife (“cut”) and I’d feel I’d been handed one of the good brains.

This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it.

people hated me in school. at college i didn’t give them the opportunity. i felt like all of me was a secret.

While it did the constitution a world of good to get one’s weekly fill of the blessed poor, one couldn’t risk sitting next to one.

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.

Some words only went with some nouns, and there was, I gaily informed them, no logic to it whatsoever. They nodded. They didn’t expect any. This was, after all, English.

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.

Really my grievance was that he was in charge and not me.