In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

Sometimes, you really didn’t have to lift a finger to get exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, all you had to do was sit back and do nothing.

Wanting is dangerous. The less you want, the safer you'll be.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost. Until the day they’re not.

I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust.

But no matter how much I tried to cling to the shining jewels of my accomplishments, it never took long before my shadow list surfaced. Everything I’d ever failed at, every second place, every rejection, mounting, mounting, mounting, until the suspicion became unbearable. (...) My life was a narrative I couldn’t parse, full of conflicting evidence.

In ten years,” Heather said slowly, “you’re not even going to remember the things that seem important now. You’re going to have totally different priorities. I bet you’ll look back and laugh at everything that feels so dramatic now.

I’d pretended I was fine, pretended I’d moved on, but the truth was, the past was still open inside me, like a half-cracked door, because it was a raw, unhealed wound.

It was all so clear now, so terrifyingly obvious. I was the villain; I always had been. It explained everything—why I’d never gotten what I wanted, no matter how hard I’d tried. It wasn’t because life was unfair, or not working the way it should. I’d had it backwards my whole life: I wasn’t the princess, set upon by misfortune; I was the witch. And life had unfolded the way it was supposed to, giving me what I deserved.

It was strange, really, how your entire life could change just like that, from one second to the next. And there was no fireworks show, no dramatic tilting of the world on its axis to signify how everything had suddenly flipped upside down, and nothing would ever be the same.

You’re a narcissist. You’ve always been vain and petty and ego-driven. You have serious daddy issues and a fucked-up dating history—including, most notably, with me. You always take the safe route because you’re scared. Case in point, your lame corporate job. You try so goddamn hard to make everything perfect because you’re convinced that’s the only way you’ll deserve—what? Love? Life, even? And as far as the world is concerned, you pushed my college roommate out a window to his death.

I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. So this is your out. Take it. Otherwise you’re mine, the way it should have been

Happiness? That was a luxury I'd never been able to afford.

Even now, to this day, I think you were the love of my life. You were always talking about your dreams, back in college. Harvard this and DC that. Well, you want to know what my dream was? You. A real best friend.” My eyes burned. Caro’s voice softened. “I would have done anything for you.

Under the surface, in the cold, in the salt, swallowed by waves, I pressed my eyes shut, letting myself sink. And in that moment a wild wishing came over me. I wanted to stay here, submerged forever. Above the surface, all the days of my life were waiting like a promise. There was nothing but a blank slate, and anything goes, and what if. My life could mean anything, I could become anyone, as long as I didn’t break surface, as long as I stayed here, suspended, in this beautiful, infinite now.

The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated.

A woman who wanted was an ugly thing. I knew it made me childish and vulnerable. My whole life had taught me that lesson. But still. For one moment, laid out on the grass, all my ruined, pointless, pent-up wanting was too great to contain—

You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.

And I knew, with all my heart and soul, that I’d loved him, and he’d been good and wicked, and in the dark, secret part of me, we were so much the same.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I wanted to stay here, submerged forever. Above the surface, all the days of my life were waiting like a promise. There was nothing but a blank slate, and anything goes, and what if. My life could mean anything, I could become anyone, as long as I didn’t break surface, as long as I stayed here, suspended, in this beautiful, infinite now

But over the years, the precious tightness of their circle had loosened, stretching to accommodate other friends, other interests, the occasional spring break with other people. Maybe it was only natural—inevitable (...). Everything felt so precarious, like one gentle nudge was all it would take to send it shattering.

Everything these last ten years has paled compared to it. I’m scared college was the last time I was really alive, the way you’re supposed to be, and I’ll never get it back.

... life was nothing if not a constant cycle of compete, rank, sort. Hierarchy, that was normal. What was strange was how deeply you could come to need it; how eventually, over enough time, you would long for someone to come and put you in your place.

I studied myself the way I’d done my whole life, searching for what others saw when they looked at me. I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust. (...) I didn’t need to be perfect, per se, as long as I was the best.

I’d had it backwards my whole life: I wasn’t the princess, set upon by misfortune; I was the witch. And life had unfolded the way it was supposed to, giving me what I deserved.

Behold Caroline Rodriguez, finally reading someone right. Finally willing to believe the worst, and of her best friend, to boot. What extraordinarily bad timing.

Me, get over it? My college boyfriend cheated on me with you, married you, and ten years later, you’re crowing about it. I feel sorry for you,

I know you sneak Adderall to study all night even though econ makes you want to kill yourself. And now I know you charge thousands of dollars to a credit card you can’t afford just to fit in.

Caro. My truest friend. The one who’d never left my side, who loved me as much today as the day we graduated. The guilt threatened to overwhelm me.