Wellness

by Nathan Hill

Who will I become? Or maybe more accurately: Which of my many selves is the true one?

“They say that marriage is hard, but it seems to me if it’s that hard then you’re probably doing it wrong.”

You helped control the project’s risk, by taking on risk yourself.

The song was of that dance music subgenre that might as well be called “Look at Me I’m in a Club!” It was music that you heard in the club, about the club, on the subject of being seen in the club—basically up-tempo drunken solipsism, with sporadic sexual depravity.

when he calculated his alleged protein requirement he found that to satisfy it he’d basically have to eat three whole chickens a day,

It was like the more online research he did, the fewer objectively true things he knew.

Jack listened to the crowd saying “We’re real, you’re not. We’re real, you’re not” and he thought that, in this moment, none of them were real.

No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on all of the YouTube channels he followed, which Toby found weirdly comforting: “Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear. “Don’t forget to subscribe,” he said, facedown, his words muffled by the pillow.

Elizabeth should have seen it coming. She understood how many people a single person could, over a lifetime, be. She’d been so many different Elizabeths in the many schools she’d attended growing up.

And the weird thing was: All of these selves felt true at the time.

“They had been going to a couples counselor until they realized they couldn’t save the marriage, at which point they switched to an uncoupling counselor, who, conveniently, worked in the same office.

has been transformed into genuinely different things, two new objects. And that’s what my math does. At its most simplistic, it describes how much you can deform an object before it becomes a new object.”

“Things change. That is a given. The real question is how much change is bearable. What you have to ask yourself is how much can your marriage change before it’s no longer fundamentally itself.”

They had not anticipated selfies. Turns out, the way to make a photo new is just to put your own face in it.

steamships would have to bring their own cows to supply milk

Your husband photographs nothing, and you prescribe nothing. He captures nothing on film, and you capture nothing in pills. He practices the art of nothingness, while you practice the science of nothingness. You’re both obsessed with it: nothingness, emptiness, blankness, absence.

What happens to a text when you eliminate logical order? What happens to stories when you eliminate causality and linear time? What happens to art when you eliminate the subject? What happens to photography when you eliminate the camera? What happens to the world when you eliminate objective truth? This is what he did. This is who he was.

Emotions, Sanborne said, were simply names that people gave, ex post facto, to biologic events, and thus it was possible and sometimes pretty common that these names were imprecise or confused or downright incorrect.

“Is Jack right for you? Is Jack wrong for you? Well, that depends. Who is this Jack we’re talking about? Who is this you? What version? At what time? In what place? Which of your many funny reflections is the accurate one? Yesterday you were this person, today you’re that person, and tomorrow…who knows? But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.”

certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.

What do real couples actually do together? he wonders. How do real couples spend all that time?