The History of Us by Leah Stewart

Author:Leah Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Three days was too long. Without Wes, she couldn’t ignore the rest of her life, which included self-loathing over how long she’d been ignoring it. The next morning she emailed her professors about letters of recommendation. That task accomplished, she still felt restless, adrift, unsatisfied. She called up the file labeled “intro. doc” and read over the first few paragraphs. They didn’t seem so bad. She even had an idea for what might come next, though it dissipated halfway through her third sentence and left her staring at her computer screen, at a thought that went nowhere. She shook her head and put her fingers on the keyboard, looked alertly at the sentence as though she were going to finish it. But she wasn’t going to finish it. Why should she? This whole project was futile and idiotic, writing some ridiculous, arcane book for a tiny group of people to read and criticize. Conceptions of distance among nineteenth-century immigrant midwesterners—who cared! Footnoting and footnoting so no one could call her out on any failures in her research. There was no good reason to have devoted her life to this. And yet, she had, dammit. This was all there was. If she couldn’t finish this sentence, she didn’t deserve to live.

“Shit,” she said after a moment and slammed her laptop shut. The problem wasn’t just the sentence. Maybe it was the environment—not just the room but the house, maybe even the neighborhood. She needed a radical change of scene. Cincinnatians swore by the distinctions between neighborhoods. It meant something to say whether someone was from the east or west side, Clifton or Cheviot or Hyde Park. Hyde Park—that’s where she would go, to hide among the conservative and the monied. She’d be a visitor to a foreign country there.

In the car, to her great relief, she thought of an end to her sentence, and once settled in a coffee shop on Hyde Park Square, she typed that sentence and wrote a few more until she had an actual paragraph. She got up to get a refill on her coffee. She thought about this later. If I hadn’t wanted a refill. If I hadn’t happened to notice the poster on the front window. If I hadn’t walked over for a closer look. If I hadn’t glanced outside. Because when she did glance outside, she saw Claire.

She saw Claire, her gone-to-New-York sister. Claire, who’d been calling regularly and saying things were fine, that rehearsals were hard but things were fine, they shouldn’t come see a performance yet, not until she had a bigger part. Not really wanting to talk about herself, Theo had noticed but hadn’t worried much about because it wasn’t as if Claire had ever been particularly chatty. That Claire, Theo’s Claire, was standing across the street with her hands on her hips and her feet in fourth position, looking in the window of a boutique. But that wasn’t possible, because Claire was in New York. And Claire didn’t have that haircut.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.