People Collide

by Isle McElroy

Stability like ours could cause suffering of the most mundane variety: boredom,

I grew up in what one former therapist called a “chaotic environment” and now everything nonchaotic felt claustrophobic. I had a tendency, too, according to a later therapist, to unsettle the settled parts of my life, like a child cutting out patches of hair.

Miss Valerie scared me in the way every person in power scared me. She didn’t love me and thus had no reason to overlook my flaws.

When the time came, she applied to only the most elite and isolated colleges in the country. These colleges served her the way engines served airplanes, lifting her to esteemed, predictable heights.

He lived without ambitions the way slugs live without shells.

When it came time to apply for colleges, he applied to only the most mediocre institutions that America offered, the institutions where his friends were applying, and because he was not a bad student—although not a student worthy of praise—he was admitted to all of them.

Throughout my stay, we would drift past each other in the halls en route to separate rooms, waving and nodding, like colleagues hired into the same family.

I was given a seat at the head of the table, where I proceeded to ramble and shiver. Everyone in the bar offered me coats, and I overheated beneath the layers, though I refused to take any off. I liked being a coatrack for their compassion.

Eventually, the canvas softened around me like breath. A restless purple spreading across the base of the painting lapped into a pale mint, the green fogging over the purple in a haze that made my chest tighten. For the first time in my life, I was feeling a painting, truly feeling it, my body awash in something I could not understand.

Such a soft and simple thing, sadness, and she treated it like a monster.

“This is the ultimate act of love, Eli, inhabiting you, living as you, shitting as you. To fully inhabit your body and not run away. There’s no way to love anyone more.”

“We might be nothing,” he said after finishing, “but at least we’ll be nothing together.”

The problem with loving someone at their best is seeing them at their worst. Elizabeth, capable of such generosity, of skin-diminishing empathy, could just as easily slip into pettiness and malice when burdened.

I stood but immediately sat back down; in moments like this Elizabeth did not like to be followed. She valued her privacy after fights and would spend those hours drifting around the neighborhood on walks, her anger cooling like a stone in the snow. Before she got far, however, she shouted, “Are you coming?”

Affairs are flickers of hope. Escape hatches.”

“It’s easy to confuse wanting to be someone with wanting to be with them.”

She felt terrible for wanting someone so badly merely because he’d given her an hour of rest.

I have read none of Locke’s books, though I have nearly memorized every interview she’s ever given. I am terrified of the actual books because in them I might find that version of myself that I will never become.

Clay Madsen was one of those Brooklyn novelists who wrote about being a Brooklyn novelist.

“I think that’s the point of all writing,” he said. “To show people things they can’t see on their own, everything right in front of their faces.”