Over fall break I went home to get my wisdom teeth removed. On my bedside table was a stack of books, and on top was The Year of Magical Thinking.

 

I read Magical Thinking the summer after my senior year of high school, when I read almost all of Joan Didion. I remember thinking vaguely that I should read it, because my aunt had just lost her husband, and she read it. It sat on the coffee table in her living room during the week after the motorcycle crash. 

 

I had taken on (or been given, I’m not interested in dwelling on this detail) the job of caring for my aunt in the aftermath, so I figured it was only logical that I read the book. Like research. Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control (Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking). Included in working it up was sleeping in her bed every night. 

 

I remember that I knew how the book ended. I knew Joan’s husband died and her daughter died, so I spent all of The Year of Magical Thinking waiting for her daughter to die. In the end she did not die, not in Magical Thinking. In the end only her husband died, and I missed it entirely.

__

 

While I’m home I see a high school mentor, seeking advice. Or some words of wisdom. We talk about my freshman year and my general maladaptation to life at Princeton. “It was like you fell,” she says, “and then you just kept falling.”

 

Rifling through my closet at home I find my brother has taken most of my clothes, including even the socks. I ask my friend Emanuelle where her crew socks are from and she says they’re from her grandmother’s closet. Her coolest pieces of clothing, the ones she likes best to tell me about, are from her grandmother’s closet. Her grandmother who made her bring a winter coat for a summer in San Francisco. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco (Mark Twain).

 

My brother asks me to pick him up breakfast from Wawa. “I don’t care what it is,” he says on the phone. “Just something I can hold.”

 

The day I get home from Princeton I immediately sleep for three hours. Then, on Wednesday, I am laid out for the entire day after my wisdom teeth removal. I hear of several friends who get sick over break: two colds, one scratched cornea, and various other afflictions. Perhaps the first six weeks was too much for us to hold. 

 

—

 

On the third day after the surgery I feel well enough, physically, to get my hair dyed; I am still emotionally shaken. I say to my mom, “I feel kind of raw, like…if I skinned my knee and then someone rubbed on it a bunch.” She says, “ew.”

 

The man who dyes my hair is senile-seeming, and remains quiet as I describe to him the color I would like. When he applies the dye, it makes streaks on my forehead like I’m bleeding from my skull. I think of my cousin telling me about when her mom dyed her hair fire-engine red, in high school. I think it’s possible mine will turn out like hers.

 

Once a friend dyed my hair at school; as I demonstrated the steps she said “oh, actually I get it, it’s similar to how I oil my hair before I go to sleep.” Repeating a ritual each night. Intimacy. The dye seeped into my skull and left it brown.

 

—

 

Post-surgery: I read Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. The characters are in crisis, but I like them, particularly three involved in some sort of unnameable polyamorous relationship. A friend says, “Of course you would like that. You’re a Slytherin.”

 

On my bedside table underneath The Year of Magical Thinking is my journal from junior year of high school. That year I was laid out with another violent affliction: a terrible crush. Especially in high school, I placed a lot of stock in keeping my cool, not going crazy over boys or girls or anyone, really. Which is why it was such a great hit to my ego when I fell fatally in love. I flip through the journal and think about the exact combination of features that makes you fall for a person.

 

Intermezzo: You have come to care too passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person (Sally Rooney). 

 

What makes a person suitable? Unfortunately for me the qualities I consider have changed little since high school; I love a narcissist, for example, and even better if they won’t give me the time of day. These qualities meant I spent a lot of my adolescence yearning and pining. Holding onto people for too long. When it costs too much to love (Fiona Apple).

 

I pity me, seventeen, even in my pathetic post-surgical state: honestly, it was a crush painful enough to warrant comparison to having teeth ripped out of my skull. I tell Eliza this on the phone and she says, “I remember that girl sounded like a nightmare,” and then comes over with three cartons of ice cream, sits on my bed, tells me stories. Noticing a stain on my pillow I say: “What is that?” And she says, “That would be bloody drool, I believe.” “Disgusting,” I say. “No, not disgusting,” she says, “I mean you did get four teeth out. Actually it’s quite tasteful — only a little bit.” 

 

I poke around in my empty wisdom teeth sockets, tasting blood, strangely gutted by their loss. Drugged up on pain medicine, I tell Eliza tearfully: “I want them back. I miss my teeth.” She says kindly, “your teeth don’t miss you.”

 

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all (Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking).

—

 

Post-break: my Shakespeare professor lectures on the idea of joint commitment. Coined by philosopher Margaret Gilbert, the term describes the small compromises we make to do things together – walk side by side, engage in conversation. He suggests Romeo and Juliet as an extreme example: two teenagers so deeply in love, so jointly committed, that they marry and kill themselves in a matter of five days.

 

Over dinner with a friend I laugh about this, how Romeo and Juliet lock eyes at a party and just know. “For me I think it’s less love at first sight and more love at repeated exposure.” That one time when someone piques your interest in a new way. Well. 

 

But Romeo and Juliet didn’t meet for the first time at that party. No, their families had obviously known each other for years. So what was it about that meeting that made the difference?

 

There is the question of choice, of course; or what happens if one person sees the vision and the other does not (read: this girl did not like me back).

 

I think of the scene between Amy and Laurie, when Amy says: Well, I believe we have some power over who we love, it isn’t something that just happens to a person. And he replies, I think the poets might disagree (“Little Women,” Gerwig).

 

—

 

I lie in bed after surgery, watching Much Ado About Nothing for class, watching Benedick and Beatrice dance around each other and fall in love. My mouth is swollen, but only a little. I have a package of frozen peas pressed to my jaw. My room is clean, sheets washed, only the books on my nightstand are out of order.

 

Leonato, to Beatrice, says: you shall never run mad, niece. Oh, but I have.