Self-Portrait with Nothing

by Aimee Pokwatka

It wasn’t that Pepper didn’t love him, she just couldn’t stop herself from imagining universes in which her life wasn’t locked in with his. She was different in those universes. Lit up.

The character Ike is very much based on my own husband (who I love dearly despite the fact that he does fill my brain with useless trivia and sneeze louder than anyone I’ve ever known), and as I wrote the book, I felt more and more that the book itself was a love letter to him. It’s easy to fantasize about happier versions of yourself; it’s harder to recognize your own happiness when you’re folding a giant mountain of kid laundry with a bad movie on in the background, though it’s those mundane moments that do hold so much of our happiness, whether we recognize it at the time or not. Pepper slowly realizes this over the course of the book, and writing the texts between her and Ike was one of my favorite parts of writing the book. I do, in fact, sometimes text "sos sos sos" to my husband. Recently, upon waking one morning, I opened my eyes to see a spider hanging over the bed. I texted my husband, who was already up, a single word: spider. Reader, he came running in a matter of seconds.