Whoever You Are, Honey A Novel

“Men have strange barometers for what makes a best friend,”

She wanted to be like the moon, obscured by darkness until she was as forgettable as a fingernail clipping.

It seems freeing, she thinks, to be heedless enough about your own ego that you’re able to worship something.

This was always how it was at other people’s houses, Mitty thought. Untouched candy bowls in the foyer, a pantry of unopened Pop- Tarts. The people who had things others didn’t never even used them.

She was enviably even- tempered in the way that girls try and sedate themselves into being at that age. But she wasn’t performing, not really. It was as if thrusting all of her weight onto the tip of her largest toe meant everything else was easy. Her ennui gave her a wisdom that made other girls— eager girls— seem stupid, still basking in stupid fantasies of disappearing into the stupid lives of stupid men.

She liked that there was nothing to do because then she never felt pressured to do something. She always imagined that it would be stressful to be a teenager somewhere with expectations, like Boston or Chicago, somewhere that tourists and college freshmen seek out on purpose, a place centered around the basin of a sports stadium, with life happening on every corner, a constant reminder of all the things you’re not doing.

“Sometimes, I spend so much time alone that I start feeling like my identity is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite name it.”

Mitty wants to tell Lena that she feels that way about her entire life. That she’s spent so much time removed from others, with only her thoughts; that sometimes when she leaves the house, she has to remind herself of her personality; that the first few minutes of every interaction is simply an act of working out the kinks of being a human.

Mitty had an art teacher once who claimed that there are two kinds of people: those who paint and those who sculpt. It’s one thing to look at a blank canvas and imagine a landscape, she said. It’s another to look at a mound of clay and see a torso. There are the brains that want to invent, and the brains that want to reveal.

What must it feel like to be so aligned with the fact of your beauty, Mitty thinks, that you assume the questions you ask will be answered, the invitations you make will be accepted, the strangers you bother will celebrate your interruption?

“No one is honest about the ways they make money, why should homeless people be?”

Never once has she experienced nightmares of looming tsunamis, sinking ships, plunging canyons in the deepest parts of the Atlantic. Of course she understands the fear. But it seems unproductive to be afraid of something so infinite, something that couldn’t be aware of your presence, that would never even target you, but instead simply overwhelm you without any sense you’d ever stood in its way. But maybe that’s what people are really afraid of— being irrelevant—

He was more passionate about her potential than her past. It was rare to find that in a man, she thought, someone who doesn’t feel threatened by all the things you could become.

“Women don’t have to like each other to be friends.”

Mitty can hardly remember what it’s like to bask in the smell of another person’s breath. To feel their spit on your chin and choose not to wipe it off.

Maybe there was someone else out there like her, reminiscing about a time he’d never lived through.

Thank you for rescuing me. Fuck you for keeping me. Where do we go from here?