تظاهر کردن

PRETENDING

I’M STRONGER WITH each passing day. Nothing hurts except my heart, but I’m trying not to use it. I keep the blinds closed. I read my books. Existential or nihilist ones. I have no patience for books that pretend life has meaning. I have no patience for happy endings.

I don’t think about Olly. He sends me e-mails that I trash without reading.

After two weeks I’m strong enough to resume some classes. Another two weeks and I’m able to resume all of them.

I don’t think about Olly. I trash still more of his e-mails.

My mom is still trying to fix me. She hovers. And worries and fusses and administers. Now that I’m stronger she coaxes me back into our mother-daughter nights. Like Olly, she wants our lives to go back to the way they were before. I don’t enjoy our nights together—I don’t really enjoy anything—but I do it for her. She’s lost even more weight. I’m alarmed and don’t know how to fix her, so I play Fonetik Skrabbl and Honor Pictionary and watch movies and pretend.

Olly’s e-mails stop.

“I’ve asked Carla to come back,” she says one night after dinner.

“I thought you didn’t trust her anymore.”

“But I trust you. You learned your lesson the hard way. Some things you just have to experience for yourself.”