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“I feel like it’s usually those small things that you’re not expecting that hit you the hardest.”
After thinking about him a lot for the past two days, I had forgotten what he looked like. Like studying something up close for too long, my memory of him had become blurry.
I wasn’t sure which was worse. Watching the guys watch Vivian or watching her myself. She was everything I was not.
I would come to realize over time that we fiction writers were just as emotional as the poets; we just did a better job of concealing it.
His writing made you laugh while also giving you a sharp pain in your throat. It made you swallow hard.
My mother had been more religious than my father. I don’t know if she believed in God, but she wanted to.
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.
He touched me, not like a guy who’d been with a lot of women, but like someone who had been with one woman, for a long time. He knew how to listen and adjust. He figured me out so well that I began to laugh.
The nice thing about the significant others was that they often distracted from the underlying tension of the immediate family.
The only thing I wanted was to be known completely by someone, to know someone completely.
My novel was the thing that got me out of bed in the morning, the thing that gave everything else meaning. Writing had always been this for me, but now it felt different. I lived in those sentences, more than I lived in my own body. For the first time in my life, I was no longer scared of my loneliness.
When she’d called me up to tell me the news about their engagement, I’d felt a stabbing, full-body jealousy. Far more jealous than when her book had come out. I did everything I could not to feel this way. I tried to sound happy and excited, the way women were supposed to sound when their other women friends got engaged. I was ashamed of my jealousy. I was ashamed of myself. Of my failed relationships. That I was alone. After we hung up, I crawled into bed and didn’t get out for days.
There was still that warmth about her—that warmth that I loved—but her eyes were bright and hard in a way that was new. I saw, looking at her, that she’d been in hell, and she’d decided at a certain point to leave it. I didn’t exactly know where she was now, as I sat with her at the dining table.
When I saw them, it wasn’t jealousy that I felt—but a startling clarity. A jolt. All those Word documents on my computer suddenly seemed meaningless. They weren’t real. Nothing was as real as the person beside you.
As we passed by all the bars and late-night food places, they each gave off a soft, inviting glow. Inside, promises of warmth and beer. Everywhere seemed to be filled with people already having a good time—the very beginning of a Friday night.
felt love for my friends, being there with them, and I also felt myself growing quiet. That familiar tug returned; the sense of not quite fitting. A sadness in a moment when you were supposed to feel happy.
