Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

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

You had to pretend to feel sad if you’d been single too long. I hated doing that because there were other things I was actually sad about.

I wondered if Edith was pretty or if I just found her so. I was aware, with my college head on me, that beauty was subjective—but I wanted to know if we were aesthetically matched.

“Everyone does that, Ava,” she said. “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 thought: someone needs to teach this man how to have a feeling, and how to write a message, and they also need to tell me what the fuck I do now.

“Some people,” Edith said, “fit a great many misogynist tropes into their personal lives.”