Crushing

by Genevieve Novak

Whoever you spent your life with, if they didn’t know how to take a joke and drag it out until it was clinging on with its fingernails then pull it back in and make you wonder how you ever saw the brighter side of things without them, then you weren’t having enough fun.

‘Learn to live in discomfort,’ she said, ignoring me, ‘and you can overcome anything.’

‘I don’t base my personality around what men like.’

I let myself exist between dream and reality, both soaking in the moment and watching it from outside myself, the red record light blinking in the top left corner of my brain.

‘Sometimes self-care means making choices that hurt right now, but protect us from something much worse.’

Because we only ever see what we want to see, and this is both a gift and a curse.

Life isn’t a storybook. There’s no arc. You just live and try to have a good time doing it.’

A cynic masquerading as a realist.

I believed I was the only person on earth without a clue what they were doing, and that when other people said this, it was only to placate me. Everyone else was a whole person, complex but complete, a finished puzzle, and only I was still a thousand cardboard squares in a box. I had questions; they had answers.

I used music to understand the world around me, windows into people’s heads, characters to become and lives to live for three and a half minutes at a time.

I had never really known what I wanted, not in any significant way. But inaction was action; opting out was a choice. I’d floated along and called it fate. But the riverbed was rising now, and I had to choose to swim against the tide or climb up on the bank. Who I was, or who I wanted to be.

‘Why is romantic love the benchmark? Why do you think it’s more meaningful than any other?’

Dogs had it figured out. They knew that the only way to love someone was to throw yourself into it, to dive in and have faith that the love you gave would come back to you.

Life and people and circumstances and self-destructive patterns would always find a way to hold your expectations up to the light and then smash them into pieces. But for now, I was okay with that. I was okay with getting it wrong. I welcomed my attempt and accepted my failure.