Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me. He liked hearing himself think aloud and I reasoned that I was profiting from it, that you never knew when you’d need facts so it was best to collect as many as you could.

But I was in the habit of thinking he was a habit.

I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life.

I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.

I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.

I liked that—babe. It made me feel accounted for. *

Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a means of quieting her class anxieties.

At work I imagined nice things that might happen to me if I were a different person.

Others were obeying the ever-robust principle that one could not expect rich people to stay anywhere too long.

I was outside their figurations. No one asked where I’d gone.

I looked out my window and told myself: it is fair enough to find it stressful that my entire life revolves around someone who does not care very much about me. This is a permissible experience. * * *

If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine.

That wasn’t true. I often lied to spare others’ feelings or to make them like me.

I couldn’t say: everyone in Dublin hated me, such that I came to hate myself, too, and I came out here trying to change that and it’d kind of worked but not fully.

It would have embarrassed us both if she’d pretended to take an interest in someone as unsuccessful as me.

The couple looked favored by destiny, like the subjects of a glossy history-book picture taken before they were famous.

off. Once I told someone I’d do something, I always did the opposite.

I said it was comforting to know he was only with me because I was short, boring, and plain.

So she probably thought I was dynamic and sought-after in ways I was too busy to even explain to her. That, or she thought I needed to manage my time better.

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

“I’m sorry if my feelings on being lied to are spilling over where you don’t want them,”

Someone else said: “Miss, do you have a husband?”

For a while we said nothing, and then he said he was often nervous around me. A year ago, I would have given the world to hear that. Now I barely noticed.

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.

If your work was an intransitive verb then that meant your trust fund subsidized it.