I Could Live Here Forever

by Hanna Halperin

Deep down I knew that I was pretty, but it seemed embarrassing to admit this, because I knew there was something ugly about me, too. My prettiness wasn’t straightforward or consistent and it was something I felt more when I was by myself. I was never the prettiest girl in the room, and never would be. I wondered if he was lying to me or if it was possible that he saw me how I saw myself in my most private, most generous moments.

I regretted not using a condom. I didn’t know why I did things like that, as though lack of protection might make us closer, or bonded. I didn’t feel close with him. I felt as if I barely knew him at all.

I had always liked to write. My stories were often about motherless daughters or childless mothers. For a creative writer, I wasn’t that creative. When I was in high school, I fantasized that my mother would somehow come across my short stories and realize she should come home. In college, my intended audience changed. I gave up on my mother and started imagining that men might read my writing and come and save me. Every story I wrote was a love letter.

And he was the only person in the world who loved me, outside of my family. But he didn’t read books or think in the same way I did. Not that I needed to be with someone exactly like me, but sometimes I would tell Robbie something about my day or a thing that I noticed, and he would just nod or shrug without asking a question or adding to the conversation. We talked. We talked all the time. But I wanted him to say something that surprised me. Or look me deep in the eye and ask: Why? And really want to know.

“I felt dumb,” I said. “You’re not dumb,” he insisted. But I wanted him to ask me why I felt dumb. “They’re all writing novels. And they were talking about authors I should have read already.” “Don’t worry about it,” Robbie said. “You’re the smartest person I know.” I teared up then, because I knew that I was going to end things with Robbie, even though I loved him.

“This character describes the trees and the road with so much feeling, but then he withholds any kind of description when it comes to his own life or the people in it. Maybe he’s in denial about who he is or what he wants. But he can still describe the way his father looks at him or the woman in the bar—and his desires or his repulsions can sneak through in those descriptions. Even if he’s not aware of his own motivations, the writer has to be aware of them. We have to see around what he’s not saying. That’s the beauty of having a first-person narrator.”

I was silently burning. Furious for not saying my thoughts about the story before Vivian had. But the truth was, I never could have articulated what I had been thinking the way she did. Vivian spoke with so much confidence. She’d said her piece without being scared that she was going to sound stupid, or that she’d gotten it wrong, or that she might wound David. And she’d said the right thing. The professor had validated her. I wanted to somehow indicate that this was what I had been thinking, too. But doing that would only make me look desperate and foolish.

We were “writing friends,” though, which I learned was a particular sort of friendship. Our lives were still separate. We could go days without speaking with or seeing each other—wrapped up in a draft or some particular mood. If someone didn’t show up to an event or left early or flaked last minute, it wasn’t considered weird. The social rules of this insular world agreed with me. It meant I could disappear, and no one would question me. Writing came first. If you received a text saying “on a roll” or “in the middle”—you knew not to interrupt. Despite the fact that we had practically no obligations or commitments ever—ample time to write—as soon as we felt our writing time was being infringed upon, we became stringent and boundaried. We took ourselves so seriously that the poets stopped hanging out with us. “You guys become kind of insufferable once you realize you could actually make money doing this,” was how one of them put it.

Wilson was one of those people who was so universally liked—so quietly charismatic—that it was hard to know what was going on inside him. It was a slow unraveling—getting to know these people. But reading their fiction, a lot of it was right there. When I started reading Wilson’s stories, I was shocked at how sad they were. It wasn’t that his laughter or his smiles were fake. The things that he saw humor in were the same things that made him sad. He couldn’t separate the two. Or maybe it was the other way around. The things that made him sad, if you looked at them hard enough, in a certain way, were funny. His writing made you laugh while also giving you a sharp pain in your throat. It made you swallow hard.

My mother was always looking to believe in something bigger than herself. Whether it was through religion or art or some specific person or experience, she was on the lookout for the divine and the powerful. Ready, at a moment’s notice, to be swept away.

The nice thing about writing was it took pain and warped it into something useful. I could shape it into a beginning and a middle and an end. It was manageable that way. And it was mine. Sharp and beautiful. By the time I was done with it, it was just a story.

I didn’t need to be the prettiest or the most successful or even the most talented. But I desperately wanted—needed—to be loved.

It was my vanity, more than anything else, that humiliated me.

“I feel bad for anyone in the world who isn’t us.”

There are certain memories I’d never write down or tell anyone. I know what happens when you write things down. They change shape. Some of the feeling goes away. Things on the page are never as rich as they are in your head, as they were in real life.

My family functioned best that way—in a crisis. The five of us against the world.

I wasn’t a normal daughter; I knew that from an early age. I was a perfect daughter. I was well behaved and always nice. I was affectionate but I knew when to pull back. When she left us, the part that hurt most was that she didn’t take me with her.

I liked the hometown dates on The Bachelor—the way the moms would cry when their daughters walked through the door, how the dads would act overprotective—how the most important thing in the world to those families was their children’s hearts. It was all bullshit. But sometimes I’d be watching one of those shows and I’d realize that I was crying or I’d see my face reflected in the computer screen—smiling like an idiot. I hated myself in those moments—that that’s who I was.

My family wasn’t like those families. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to show each other love. I had no doubt that my family loved me. We didn’t know how to show each other pain. We didn’t know how to comfort one another. We were shadows; a shadow of a family. When I thought about it from an outsider’s perspective, I didn’t blame my mother for taking off. I hoped, in some weird way, that she’d found a new family. I wanted that for her in the same way that I hoped that someday I, too, might find myself a new family.

My loneliness. Sometimes I was sure I had a sickness. It had been there for as long as I could remember, a heaviness that pressed down on my chest at night, and sometimes during the day, too. It was a feeling that separated me from other people, even though the core of the feeling was wanting, in a terrible way, to feel close to someone. When I was young I’d always known that the antidote to my loneliness would be to fall in love someday. I looked forward to love more than anything else about growing up. More than leaving home or learning to drive or doing drugs—things that other kids were excited about. I didn’t care about those things. The only thing I wanted was to be known completely by someone, to know someone completely.

I was repulsed by David because I recognized his desperation. He wanted so badly to be loved, and he thought now it was going to happen. He thought being admired and being loved were the same thing—that it all came from the same well.

Being saved from sadness and saving someone from sadness—these weren’t just things I yearned for out of the blue. It was something I’d been born into. I didn’t know how to separate the feeling of love from the feeling of wanting to escape.

It all felt silly—surrounded by masses of nursing and business and veterinary students. All these newly appointed professionals were about to go out into the world and practice law, prepare taxes, deliver babies. Our diplomas meant little. The Word documents we’d edited over and over again, the literary journals we’d sent them to, the hours-long debriefs after workshop—in the huge amphitheater that day, all of it seemed to matter less. We wrote characters who were doctors and lawyers and social workers. But what did we actually do?

“I’ve been thinking about it and it doesn’t really matter that we’re going to be apart. When I close my eyes at night and I think about you—the fact that our love exists—to me, that’s enough to get by. To get through another day.” “But I can’t be the only thing that gets you through the day.” “I know. But life is better with you in it. You make all the shit parts worth it.” “Same, Charlie.” “This is the best relationship I’ve ever been in.” I didn’t respond. It was a delusion. Everything he was saying. But that’s what this entire relationship had been. What was the point of being truthful about it now?

“A relationship isn’t supposed to make you happy. You find happiness on your own. A partner is there to support you and build with you. It seems as though you’re looking for some magic person who’s going to solve all your problems, but you have to do that yourself. What we have together is complicated, but it’s good and real.”