I’m Sorry You Feel That Way

by Rebecca Wait

The occasions themselves would usually be fine, and sometimes even enjoyable. But the chasm that exists between not being at a social gathering and being at a social gathering has always seemed vast to Alice, and yet must somehow be traversed in a few seconds.

For a while, her favourite opening gambit is to pretend she has forgotten a pen and to ask to borrow one from the person next to her. Unfortunately, once she has obtained the pen, it is a challenge to proceed further. Celia might compliment the owner on the pen’s lovely glide on paper, its useful clip, the pleasant hue of the ink; or if it’s a ballpoint, she might share her interesting fact about the Biro brothers. But she has yet to convert one of these interactions into a more prolonged exchange, never mind a friendship.

Every time she reads one of Anne’s replies, Celia feels a sink of disappointment. There is something so deflating in their breeziness. Oh, the anguish of loving more than you are loved!

Celia watches Anne cry, and while she does, she has a disorientating realization. It is that Anne is entirely without self-consciousness. None of this crying is for effect, to make herself seem more tragic, to make Celia feel more guilty, and it hasn’t occurred to Anne to try to save face. Unlike Celia, whose every act is a strained performance in front of a silent, critical audience, Anne has no imaginary spectators.

Perhaps this, she thinks at last, is why people really have children: not a biological urge after all, but because children provide a necessary weight, like an anchor, so that you might at last stop wondering what you are missing, so that you might at last feel you belong in your own life.

‘I suppose it serves me right,’ their mother says at last, ‘for marrying a man who plays with toys for a living.’

‘What are you hiding?’ she says sometimes, and Alice tries not to hide anything, tries to empty herself out for her mother to inspect, but always there are a few stubborn traces that cling to her insides and won’t be brought into the light.

it is very possible she is here only as a result of administrative error. She wonders when she will be found out.

So there is no escape. And in any case, she has nowhere to go. It is nice not to be responsible for herself any longer, not to have to make any decisions. The lanyard people have taken her on. Good luck to them.

It is strange how close Alice feels to Hanna during this time. It makes no sense, given Hanna is several hundred miles away and won’t take Alice’s calls. But Alice often feels an ache in her abdomen, just below her ribs, as if she has swallowed Hanna’s misery whole and now she doesn’t have space left to breathe.

There is no recovery from a missing child. Hanna’s absence feels like an amputation, the phantom limb still hurting every day.