Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

He registered that I’d said something, then continued a parallel conversation.

“To be clear, Ava: we’re both dead behind the eyes, but at least I can pay rent?”

I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life. It would also provide an acceptable reason he did not want us to get too close. The more plausible reading was that he was single and that while I could on occasion discharge the rocket science of making him want to fuck me, he did not want to be my boyfriend. That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.

I’d feel his arms; wonder (a) why I was a cold and ungrateful person and (b) if anyone would ever love me; know the answers were (a) I’d decided to be and (b) no; and eventually say, “I like your arms.”

I asked why he was claiming to be single when he’d mentioned his girlfriend three seconds ago, and he said he’d made her up because I intimidated him. I wondered if he would be a better or worse person without narcotics.

We were the sum of the routines we’d built around each other. * * *

because I was not special, I felt he was the only person who would ever understand me.

He’d left some shirts behind that I still hadn’t ironed. The creases seemed like his, though I knew they were the washing machine’s.

I’d found the journals Julian had written poetry for at Oxford but hadn’t dug further because I was worried the poems would be bad and I’d have to keep living in his apartment.

For her, I’d burn a candle worth four hours’ pay to me, i.e. one-sixth of a day, thinking: the other five-sixths are there, too, if you want them.

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. “I know it’s all very silly,” she said, “but it’s fun.”

you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.

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 saw I hadn’t just been holding back from coming out to Edith as part of some game. 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, but I’d never had to confront it in Hong Kong because I hadn’t had a crush on a woman till now. Or maybe I didn’t care about coming out and just didn’t want her to know that I was into her specifically. It was impossible to separate these issues. I couldn’t like Edith without liking women, and I also felt—illogically, but with conviction—that I couldn’t like women without liking Edith. And I had that thought mid-laugh, so I had to keep laughing or Edith would see what I’d been thinking.

“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 wanted to explain that to Edith: that holding Julian’s hand was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers was like holding a grenade. But that didn’t make sense even in my head, so I knew it wouldn’t if I tried to say it aloud. And she didn’t want to hold hands either, so it never came up.

She covered her mouth with her hands. She did that when she found something genuinely funny, but didn’t when she was only laughing to be polite. I liked knowing that about her.

I felt like abandoning everything else I did to try to be happy, and just spending the rest of my life finding things Edith needed to be told, and telling her.

Actually, the brain grew new cells the more information you fed it. I didn’t like that and was sorry I’d thought of it, because it meant they were getting smarter than me every day.

The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”

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.

I’d broken up with someone who told me how they felt, and I’d gone back to someone who either did not tell me, or felt nothing.

Which fairly described how I felt about him. I started persuading myself that my behavior was different, then realized I loved the idea that we were calmly exploiting each other and would both go to hell when we died.

My bag was light. I’d given away most of my clothes. On the phone to Mam about the move, I’d mooted throwing them down the garbage chute. She’d said that would be a waste. “I know,” I’d said, “but so was buying them.” Then I decided they’d lose their history faster if I donated them. Soon they’d stretch around other people and crease where their knees and elbows bent. If I’d dumped them, they’d have gone on fitting me.