One Small Mistake

by Dandy Smith

I forget when people ask how you are, they don’t really want a truthful answer.

‘Yeah, if someone told me I had to be unhappy for a year and then it would all be over, I could handle that. But if someone told me I had to be unhappy for the next fifty years, I’d have to make a change.’

How is knowing there’s someone worse off supposed to make you feel better? As though it’s socially acceptable to take a little bit of comfort in the knowledge that there’s someone out there suffering more than you are right now.

Why is it that men always feel the need to announce they’ve nipped the hoover round or done a load of laundry like they’ve just cured cancer? Then they beam at you as though they’re waiting for you to offer them a gold star or a blow job despite the fact that you do these chores every day without so much as a ‘thanks for that’ from the supposed love of your life.

It’s not fair our sexual organs come with an expiration date while men can carry on reproducing until they’re in their seventies. And if you’re a woman and you decide you don’t want a baby, you’re selfish or defective, and people sit there and insist you’ll “change your mind”. Well, what if you don’t change your mind? Are you a bad person?’

‘You need a love that burns,’ he tells me. ‘A love that consumes. Something exciting, unpredictable. Maybe even a little dangerous.’

during negotiation you always ask for the impossible, then settle instead for what you actually wanted in the first place. That way, you make the other party feel like they’ve won and they’re more likely to give you what you want.

‘Love is always a risk; it’s giving another person the power to destroy you and hoping they choose not to, but when it goes right …’ I don’t even think she’s aware that as she says this, her gaze drifts towards Christopher. ‘When it goes right, it’s like falling through stars.’

What I need now and what I’ll need always, is a love that washes over me like river water. That soothes. A love I can bathe in.