I stayed on the ground a little longer, looking up at the sky and trying to take my losing-it level from an eight down to a more manageable five or six. Helen had taught me some brain exercises and I tried a few of them now, taking in my surroundings and naming textures, shapes, and colors. I did some humming and gargling, secure in the knowledge that no one outside the wall could hear me desperately stimulating my vagus nerve in secret. I started to feel more settled and present very quickly. （The most annoying thing about these exercises was their efficacy.） I sat up and let out a big, declarative exhale, bringing my knees to my chest. Inside my bra, my left boob vibrated. I fished out my phone and looked at the message: wasn’t sure if i should text, but wanted to say happy birthday xS.
I opened my mouth and ran my fingers along the ridged, wet collar of my T-shirt. I stared at the message, adjusting the brightness of my phone so my face shone in the dark, and let out a surprised sound somewhere between a gasp and a hiccup. The little x with the initial was classic Simon: soft and sincere and a bit officiously formal. He had once told me he composed all important text messages in the Notes app first, only copying and pasting when he knew exactly what he wanted to say. I imagined him trying out different sign-offs: （it’s Simon, by the way）; xo Big S; your erstwhile lover, Simon. I reached down to scratch a mosquito bite on the back of my ankle and began to laugh.
What now?! What fucking now? The temptation to call him or go to his house was very strong. But he had not invited me there, he had merely said happy birthday. He was not actually asking to see me at all, but he was reaching out with affection after twelve a.m., which was not nothing. I would just . . . text him tomorrow, then? See if he wanted to “catch a movie”？ Ludicrous. I laughed as loud as I’d cried, my shoulders shaking, my head in my hands. You little idiot, I thought. You sweet, deranged moron.
I tried to center myself, to find some calm. But how could I? My phone glowed white blue, and my butt felt soft on the earth, and I was sitting in an actual graveyard having some tiny private epiphany. If it wasn’t Simon, now, it would be somebody else someday, and wasn’t that insane? I would have to figure out how to love them without freaking out, and some small part of me would have to believe that it was real. More outrageous than this was the possibility that one day, it might be.
I thought about next year, how I had no idea what it would be like, who I would meet, what they would do. Things would happen to me, and I would make decisions, and sometimes they would work out and sometimes they wouldn’t. It would carry on like that, over and over, until ideally, I got incredibly old and died in my sleep, maybe with somebody nice nearby, or a cat that would definitely eat part of my face, but what would I care, I’d be drifting around in that endless nothing space I could not think about too long without becoming sweat-drenched and queasy. It was a funny idea, my existing for years and years, shit happening all over the place, everything seeming so Big and Meaningful. And it was, but also it wasn’t. I would feel one way for a while, and then I would feel another way, and it would never be forever, because nothing is.
I wiped my nose and did a bit more humming. A warm breeze moved through the trees above me, dislodging a fat chestnut that clattered to the ground near my feet. I looked up at the empty church, then past it at the moon, full and gorgeous and absurd. I clicked the side of my phone and the message disappeared. Then I got up from the ground, still laughing, and went home.
An Epilogue
The papers arrived on a Tuesday, bundled with a magazine, a hydro bill, and a postcard from one of Amy’s friends （“Dallas ain’t the same without you, slut!”）。 I opened the envelope carefully, leaving the dense stack on the counter while I made coffee and toasted an English muffin.
The places I needed to sign were tabbed. I considered reading the entire thing over, but Lori had walked me through it already: satisfactory division of assets, refusal of further financial liability, mutual desire to dissolve the marriage . . . I got the gist.
It crossed my mind that it might be best not to get a buttery fingerprint on important legal documents. I put down the muffin.
Flipping to the first of the tabbed pages, I noticed Jon’s signature was different. It seemed larger, loopier, the Ps in his last name more ostentatiously P-like. Possibly he had jazzed it up for the occasion, or maybe I had misremembered or forgotten it. It looked like the handwriting of a stranger.
I wrote my name under his and finished the muffin. Later that day I would do something else.
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgements for my essay collection rambled on for three pages, so I am going to try to keep things concise here, but I am very grateful to a lot of people so we may end up with a ramble no matter what we do. Thank you for your patience （we’ve begun）。
Enormous thanks to my wonderful agents, Marya Spence and Claire Conrad, as well as their assistants at Janklow & Nesbit. Their support during every stage of this process has made impossible things possible; I would never have found Merris without Marya. It is also through my agents that I ended up with the dream team of Kishani Widyaratna and Jessica Williams, who guided the book to its final form with such wisdom and humor. I’m very grateful to them, their assistants, and the publicity and marketing teams of 4th Estate and William Morrow, as well as to the many, many people involved in printing, distributing, and selling this novel. Thank you in particular to Sari Shryack, Mumtaz Mustafa, and Jo Thomson for designing the book’s beautiful covers. Thank you to Louise Glück for use of her gorgeous poem in the epigraph.
Many people provided early feedback that made this book better than I could have managed on my own. Thanks to Katie Baker, Emma Herdman, Nathan Foad, Adam Howard, Marisa Meltzer, Liz Watson, Amy Reed, Catherine Liao, Helen Gould, Neha Patel, Emily Whalen, Hali Hamilton, Emily Stubbings, Celeste Yim, DJ Mausner, Sarah Hagi, Mark Lund, Rose Johnson, Caroline O’Donoghue, Dolly Alderton, Adam Burton, and Josie Long, for conversations, emails, and advice that changed the book’s shape. In particular, Tess Degenstein, Kathryn Borel, Laura Dawe, Lauren Oyler, and Joel Golby fielded a LOT of texts about the book and still read it, in full, in some cases several times over. Thank you so, so much.
Thank you to Paul Bogaards for his support and advice throughout the unfamiliar process of putting something like this out into the world. Thanks to Abby Singer and Rob Kraitt of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, Cara Masline and Katie Newman at 3Arts, and their assistants for their continued support.
I am most grateful to my close friends and family for their support during crises fictional and real. Special shout out to the original Five Poots group chat; my almost comically supportive parents, Peter and Janice; my kind and funny sisters, Alice and Melissa; and Stephen Carlick, who hears every idea and joke the first （and fortieth） time, and whose calm care has been one of the great surprises of my life.
About the Author
MONICA HEISEY is a writer and comedian from Toronto. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue （UK）， Elle, the Guardian （UK）， Glamour, New York magazine, and VICE, among others. She has written for television shows like Schitt’s Creek, Workin’ Moms, Baroness von Sketch Show, and more. She lives in London. This is her first novel.