The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

Mireille tells herself that she needs to stop drinking wine; her alcohol-induced merriment is both masking and exacerbating her unhappiness, and having wrung as much mileage as she could out of being wonderful, she might now (accidentally) see what kind of numbers she could run up on being difficult. She will not do this. Difficult never feels as good as you want it to.

When Yoshi is asked many questions about how he feels, or who he is, he imagines a crystallization: his self changing from liquid to solid, acquiring precise geometries. This is usually pleasurable. After a minute, Yoshi un-checks the box for Restless.

Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain. It’s a very easy to mistake to make, though. She’d refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she’d felt that “darkness” was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being. You didn’t have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was.

I like to do very hard things, but this should not be a thing I am proud of, because it is more than liking a challenge. I like to do very hard things because then I know that I am not what my father said I was, which was a meek boy who was afraid. And because he was not so wrong, my father. I was afraid. I was timid, I didn’t want to do many things. I forced myself, over and over. It was shameful, to meet so many other people in my life, in my work, all people who loved doing hard and maybe scary thing. That is what they wanted. I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to have done it. You see this difference? I see it, and so often I dislike myself. I wish to be so much better than I am, to change totally my nature.