The Roughest Draft(83)

I’m not the only one here. There’s a woman doing yoga in the corner of my view, a couple walking hand in hand close to the water, families packing up umbrellas and beach bags. In moments like this, it’s so hard to reckon with everyone else’s life just continuing on, independent of mine, of how I feel I’ve pushed myself once more right to this familiar crossroads.

I find I’m crying, tears streaming down my face. I could just leave, I realize. Not to return to my home in Los Angeles with Chris, but I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to finish this book. The only reason I’m in Florida, writing with Nathan, was to save my relationship, which is gone now. If I want out, there’s finally nothing forcing me to stay.

Wiping my eyes, I feel without flinching the weight of what I’m considering. It’s not every day you reevaluate everything. The breeze blows over the sand, shifting the sea of footprints into new shapes. For years, I chased dreams of literary success, then realized how fragile they were once I’d caught them. I put my dreams elsewhere, into a relationship that would become a marriage that would become a life. Now, I’m not chasing anything. I sit, letting the emptiness envelop me.

Nathan’s words fill it. You’re afraid of your own happiness. He said it like an insult. He doesn’t understand how not ridiculous my fear is. Happiness is terrifying. I’d hurt much less in the long run if I pushed Nathan out of my life, deleted our book, found something safer to chase. I imagine my modest, frictionless existence. With the earnings from Only Once, I could move to the city of my choosing. I could go to grad school, spend my time reading, surround myself with people who aren’t writers.

I press my forehead to my knees. I’m really considering this. It’s the second time I’ve walked right up to the promise of what our career could be, what we could be. It feels like it’s going to be the second time I don’t take the final step.

But it has to be this way. For me, it does. I just need to sort out how I’ll keep from coming back to these frightening heights again and again.

I’ll just change, I promise myself. I’ll learn how to more carefully keep what I want most out of the corners of my vision.

It needs to start now. Quietly, I pack up my unfurling feelings for Nathan.

I focus on the sounds of the wind and people splashing in the water. The minutes pass. Despite the calm I feel, I’m not convinced it will last. Like I’m not out of the woods, only closing my eyes to them.

Then, in my head I hear—first words, then sentences.

I don’t know that happiness is the goal, really. Not always. It’s a woman’s voice. The reply is in a man’s. If we’re not doing this to be happier, then why, Evelyn?

To find out who we are again, Evelyn says.

I laugh to myself. It’s dialogue. I’m writing dialogue.

The realization is so funny to me that my laughter shakes my whole body. My tears turn sweet.

The calm dissipates. What replaces it is surer, stronger. It’s something innermost finding its way forward, uninvited. Even with nothing left, I’m writing. Writing remains. Maybe it’s my own answer. Maybe it’s simply me. I’m doing it not because it promises an unfraught future, because it’s free of pain or peril—I’m doing it because it demands to be done.

For the first time, I contemplate the possibility of reconciling myself with those consequences. Instead of imagining paths of retreat, I try to put my writer’s mind to work imagining paths forward.

I understand, genuinely, that I can’t avoid crashing after feeling joy. It’s just the way I’m made, I know. Depression and anxiety will be there. I can’t simply choose to live without them—like I can’t simply choose to live without writing.

What I can do is . . .

I push myself to force this possible future into focus. What I can do is protect myself while I pursue what I love. I have to face the fact the fear is coming. I’ve felt it in recent weeks like I did before Only Once—tremors before tidal waves. What I need to do is use what I have to stay upright. I have knowledge of myself. I have courage. I have my therapist, with whom, I decide, I’ll schedule weekly calls surrounding the release.

I’ll need them, because I’m finishing this book. Because it’s coming out, and it’s going to be good.

I stand, swiping the sand from my legs. I don’t let my eyes linger on the horizon, now decked in the final embers of daylight. If I write, if I finish this book, it’s because I want to. Which I do. I have my direction. There’s nothing left to hide behind.

I walk back to my car, back to Nathan. Back to my life.





60





Nathan


I run.

I follow every street in our small neighborhood, hoping I get lost somehow. I pound the pavement in ways I never have before, the effort cutting my windpipe raw. The curbs of each corner fly past me, indistinct, while I push myself ever harder.

When Katrina left without a word, I did the only other thing I could instead of writing. I grabbed my running shoes and headed out, directionless. I couldn’t sit in the house with her gone, wondering if she was even coming back.

Finally, on the verge of collapse, I have to return home. When I do, her car is in the driveway. Despite myself, relief rushes into my pounding heart, fear following close behind. I speed up my steps. If Katrina’s here, it means something. I just don’t know what. I’m simultaneously unable to process and hyperconscious of the details of the night, the solitary hum of some insect, the crescent moon overhead. On the porch steps, I tell myself how this will go. I won’t let history repeat. I’m different now, and I think—I hope—Katrina is, too.