Sad Janet: A Novel

by Lucie Britsch

I wonder if the first person ever to feel sad mistook it for something else. That they needed the bathroom, maybe, or were hungry, or just very tired. We’re all so tired. Our era will be known as the Greater Depression.

He is only saying that because he has taken the pills, the good son. He’s like one of those before-and-afters. Before he started taking pills, he barely gave a shit about himself. Now he’s somehow convinced some poor woman to marry him and have his child. I have to admit they worked for him, the pills. They take the edge off, he’s always saying. People are always saying this, like edges are bad, but really where would we be without them? Ask Bono.

Happiness is not on my radar. I want other things. Like control over my life, my body. Like being able to get through a day without feeling like I’m doing it wrong. I want to feel all my feelings, not swallow them, and if they swallow me, so be it.

My sadness wasn’t caused by any one horrific unspeakable incident, like my mother thinks it was. It’s more an accumulation of tiny sadnesses, ones I’ve been collecting for as long as I’ve known the value of pockets. I’m going to need more pockets is my You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

I’ve always been like this. It doesn’t matter if I’m alone in bed or not. Stuff that happened today at work, last week, last year, five years ago, it’s all just there at the front of my brain when it’s supposed to be shelved away, like I’ve stored it all wrong, like my brain is one of those closets you never want to open because everything will fall out and crush you. My brain is all abandoned board games and broken lamps. Unworn sweaters you were too lazy to return. I worry that if I live long enough, the stuff will be too much and I’ll be glad when I start forgetting.

I had him cycle over to see me after his shift finished at one in the morning. He’d appear on my doorstep, exhausted and dirty, and I’d search his pockets for tips and those tiny umbrellas they put in the drinks at his restaurant. I was obsessed with those tiny umbrellas. To me they represented a sort of pocket-sized joy, where the regular-sized ones represented despair. I was happyish then, as you are at the beginning of relationships, before the crud starts forming—literal crud, because you can’t be bothered to clean, just to have sex, but also the crud that forms on your heart from having to defend it all the time.

I love October. It’s a good month. It makes me the closest to happy a month can make anyone. It’s always Halloween in my heart.

My empathy for humans is weird and fleeting.

whereas I went to the woods—but sometimes I wonder if she’s had something in her brain removed. The thing that worries. The thing that needs a rest. A proper meal. She seems more like a plant than a person. Only needing sunlight and water. This simplicity is what annoys me, more than her bikini body. It’s like she’s some secret existential Jedi master who knows all the rest is bullshit. And if complications are bullshit to her, I wonder if I’m bullshit too.

I keep my joys small and close to my chest. I’m not trading them in for anything flashier, not anytime soon.

Love is like gluten, I should have told the doctor. I can’t process it properly.

Letting people slide on their ethical lapses is my gift to them.