Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
“Just a lot of thinking,” I admit. “Or overthinking.”
“You saw Kim today, I take it?”
Kim, my therapist for the past ten months and the woman who I hope will help me crack the code to writing, dating, feeling like myself again. Kim, who hears all my angst about love and relationships and inspiration because I really, truly do not want to drop the depth of my stress in Jess’s lap (she and River are still relative newlyweds), or my sister Alice’s lap (she is pregnant and already fed up with her overprotective obstetrician husband), or my mother’s lap (she is already overly invested in my relationship status; I don’t want to send her to therapy, too).
In the past, when I’ve felt discontentment like this, I knew it would ebb with time. Life has ups and downs; happiness isn’t a constant or a given. But this feeling has lasted nearly a year. It’s a cynicism that now seems permanently carved into my outlook. I used to spend my life writing love stories and carrying the boundless optimism that my own love story would begin on the next page, but what if that optimism has left me for good? What if I’ve run out of pages?
“I did see Kim,” I say. “And she gave me homework.” I pull a little Moleskine notebook from my purse and wave it limply. For years, these colorful journals were my constant companions. I took one everywhere I went, writing book plots, snippets of funny conversations, images that would pop into my head at random times. I called them my idea notebooks and used to scribble things down twenty, thirty, forty times a day. These scribbles were my deep well of ideas. For a few months after my romance brain came to a screeching halt in front of a thousand fresh college grads, I continued carrying one around in hopes inspiration would strike. But eventually, seeing it there in my purse stressed me out, so I left them in my home office, collecting dust with my laptop and desktop. “Kim told me I need to start carrying notebooks again,” I tell Jess. “That I’m ready for the gentle pressure of having one with me, and even writing a single sentence or drawing a doodle in it will help.”
She takes a second to absorb this. The phrase even writing a single sentence hangs between us. “I knew you’d been in a slump,” she says, “but I don’t think I realized how bad it was.”
“Well, it doesn’t happen all at once. For a while, I wrote, but it wasn’t very good. And then I started to worry it was actually pretty terrible, and that made me think I’d lost my spark. And then thinking I’d lost my spark made me think maybe it was because I’d stopped believing in love.”
Her frown deepens, and I press on. “It isn’t like I woke up one day and thought, Wow, love is a lie.” I stab the olive in my drink, then use the toothpick to point in her direction. “Obviously you’re proof that it’s not. But at what point do I acknowledge that maybe my love life isn’t going to be what I think it is?”
“Fizz—”
“I think I might have aged out of the majors.”
“What? That is—” She blinks, her argument dying on her tongue. “Well, that is actually a very good metaphor.”
“It’s the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: Has the writer’s block killed my romance boner, or has losing my romance boner killed my actual boner?”
“There are a lot of boners in this situation.”
“If only! And once you’re single for so long, you aren’t even sure whether you’re suitable for a relationship anymore.”
“It’s not like you’ve wanted to be in one,” she reminds me. “I don’t know who Felicity Chen is if she’s not treating dating like it’s an extreme sport.”
I point at her again, energized. “Exactly! That’s another fear I have! What if I’ve depleted the local resources?”
“Local… resources?”
“I joke that I’ve dated every single man in San Diego County—and inadvertently some of the married ones—but I don’t really think it’s that far off from the truth.”
Jess scoffs into her wine. “Come on.”
“Remember Leon? The guy I met when he spilled a huge tray of Greek salad on my foot in the Whole Foods parking lot?”
She nods, swallowing a sip. “The guy from Santa Fe?”
“And remember Nathan, who I met on a blind date?”
She squints. “I think I remember hearing that name.”
“They’re brothers. Twins. Moved out here together to be closer to family. I went out with them two weeks apart.” Jess claps a hand to her mouth, stifling a laugh. “When Nathan walked into the restaurant and approached the table, I said, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing here?’ ”
Her laugh breaks free. “I’m sure he and Leon get that all the time, though.”