Losing It (24 page)

“It's from when I was a kid,” he said. “But I still use it and write it in all my books. I like to think of my old house still getting these sci-fi paperbacks.”

I closed it, and smiled, and kissed his shoulder.

—

Strangely, and unexpected to us both, Viv and I started writing e-mails back and forth after I was gone. It began when I got in touch about a pair of earrings I'd left there. She wrote back and said she'd found them one afternoon in the sunroom, which she was having remodeled. I pictured the whole thing getting bulldozed—the floor and the careworn pillows, the wooden coffee table, all of it being replaced by modern furniture and gleaming fixtures.

In our e-mails, we seemed to find a frankness and humor that we'd never been able to achieve in person. I found myself chatting to her about my day—the European history class I was taking at San Antonio Tech, how I'd gotten a part-time job as a swimming instructor at the gym to make some money, what it was like to be in my old room. She kept me updated on her friends and the little dramas that were happening at her office. I found myself looking forward to her e-mails. She was funny in her writing and had a flair for describing the things that people did, the strange policies she had to adjust to at work, sending it all up in a sharp, wry way.

She'd decided to pay someone to make her a proper website. She'd submitted her plates to more art shows and had even received an honorable mention at a Southern Folk Art Exhibit she'd gone to with one of her friends, and that was pretty good for someone with hardly any formal artistic background. She was even thinking of going to a workshop in Vermont. And there had been other interest, too, in selling her plates.

I wish I could say she'd met someone. That she'd finally had some throaty relationship where she came out of her shell, and
discovered earthly pleasures and really explored them. Wouldn't that be nice? To think that life would just
be
that way? I'm not saying it still can't.

I remember sitting on the front porch on one of my last nights there. The front door was open and music was wafting outside. It was warm and spongy and I was barefoot, wearing a big shirt. It was a dark night. There was a thick plaid of insect sounds and every once in a while you could see the light from a car crawl by in the distance. Feel young, I kept telling myself. Just feel young. I was still only twenty-six. Generally, I still felt dogged with anxieties about the future—what I was going to do when I got back to Texas, if I was going to go back to school or not, what was going to happen with my parents. I kept thinking of that plaza at San Antonio Tech, with the spindly new trees, where my mom took her test. I pictured myself walking across the way, in the sun, wearing a backpack. And then, unexpectedly—a heavy bubble of happiness rose in me.

It's strange, but my instinct was to suppress it, because it somehow didn't seem fitting. Why would you do that? Why would you feel the need to push down a feeling of joy that kicked up from the world? Just go with it, I told myself, because you never know. The grain of it doesn't tell you anything about its volume.

Thank you, William Boggess—your faith in this meant the world to me. Thank you, Laura Perciasepe, for your genius edits, which made this book a much better version of itself. Thank you, Julie Barer, for your guidance. For your insight and encouragement, thank you to Alena Smith, Gina Welch, Matt White, Molly Minturn, Nell Boeschenstein, and Kelley Libby. Thank you to my family—Mom, Dad, Ben, Dan, Nicole, and Melanie—and thank you to the Brocks. Thank you to Jynne Martin, Liz Hohenadel, Margaret Delaney, Alex Guillen, and everyone at Riverhead. Most of all, thank you to Adam, my husband, for more than I could ever name.

Emma Rathbone
is the author of the novel
The Patterns of Paper Monsters
. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Grant in Fiction, and her work can also be seen in the Virginia Quarterly Review and on newyorker.com. A graduate of the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

emmarathbone.com

twitter.com/EmmaRathbone

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