Kristen Arnett

A New York Times Bestseller "This book is my song of the summer." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Esquire, The Week, BuzzFeed, NYLON, Bustle, HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and more.

Mostly Dead Things

Emiley Jones

“Will I ever get tired of this?” I asked the question aloud, though I already knew the answer. You couldn’t get sick of sustenance when you were starving.

You don’t know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out. Milo told Brynn he loved her and I could see from the look on his face he thought the words were a magical incantation. Say the word love and it’s there for you; say the word love and the other person feels it too. What I should have told him that day: love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection. But he was young then and so was I, and I wanted their happiness more than my own. So I swallowed my pain and let myself pretend love could flourish if I didn’t stand in its way.

I often wondered why we couldn’t talk about the present, why the past held all the promise while the future sat before us like stagnant water.

We spent so much time looking for pieces of ourselves in other people that we never realized they were busy searching for the same things in us.

Love was a thing that needed constant care. Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.

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