How to Fall Out of Love: The Story of a Self-Fulfilling Pen

But why do you collect the bones of every experience that disappoints you? Why do you crack them open and suck at the marrow long after there’s anything left?

Three months ago, Margaret had passed, and her property, her assets, she’d left to her children. To Nora, her student, she’d left a box of stationery – BIC pens and half-used highlighters, it was abnormal to say the least. In modernity, they were disposable, really; they weren’t quills and ink pots inscribed with an ancestor’s name, no. Maybe it had been symbolic, everybody thought. At least Mummy hadn’t left Nora the summer house in Antibes or their estate in Aix, and so they brushed the oddity under the rug and moved on with their ironed, white-panted lives.

But what nobody suspected was that Nora would find, amongst the sticky tape, and scissors and bullet clips, an autoprofígrafo. A self-fulfilling pen – the kind Margaret had written about in one of her short stories, a pen that could write things into existence. And there Nora sat at her desk with the mythical pen, the thing of stories, between her trembling fingers.

“Who are you?” she managed.

A crooked, deformed silhouette hobbled out from the shadows and into the orange glow of Nora’s desk lamp. She gasped, taking in his familiar eyes as green as Isaac’s, his olive skin like Alex’s; his teeth, the top row gap-toothed like Tom’s, the bottom row as straight as Kenny’s, and his jaw deformed by the incongruity, perpetually open as though supported with a jack stand. And his body, it was squished and crooked under the weight of housing so many contradictions. Lopsided were his shoulders, caving in like a broken roof.

“I’m your creation,” it wheezed, voice squelching through saliva. Nora could hear Alex somewhere beneath the rasp, hear Isaac’s baritone beneath the groan. The creature, it sounded like it was suffering, like its very existence demanded all its energy – to not fall apart and crumble, to not dissipate then and there, to not buckle at the knees and melt into the carpet.

Nora turned her chair to face him, watched as his puny hands formed fists by his side, then relaxed, as though squeezing invisible stress balls.

What you think about, Margaret had said, what you write about, you give it life. You write it into existence, Nora.

Nora had written this poor thing into existence – she’d reanimated her trauma and breathed life into it. Writing was meant to be cathartic, she’d always argued, but maybe Margaret was right. Maybe by writing about it, dwelling on it, she’d been keeping it alive. And there stood her past—the cognitive dissonance, the C-PTSD, the glimmers of hope, the disappointment—his club feet on her white carpet, his sunken knees on the verge of dislocation, kneecaps caressing the skin like a chick hatching from an egg.

“Are you OK?” asked Nora, blinking hard, as though the creature might dissipate like steam.

“Are you?” it retorted, hobbling over, feet dragging.

Nora leaned back in her chair, grip tightening around the autoprofígrafo.

The creature leaned down from its towering height, and tucked a gnarled finger beneath Nora’s chin, its green eyes fixed on hers, watery and pus-filled, lids glued in part together by white webs of gunk. But very much alive, it was, its infected eyes glistening with knowing, with thought, with soul, with pain, like staring into the eyes of an ape and knowing there’s an entire world in there as there is in us.

Only worse, because in its eyes, Nora saw all the men she’d loved – and there they were, visibly decomposing before her – memories grafted one over the other oozing like infected skin, nostalgia swelling red like a transplant rejected from within. They’d decayed long ago, and her writing, like life support, had forced them to live forever in a literary state of vegetation, or worse, rot.

Maybe it was more than her writing that had kept them alive, bed sores and all – maybe it was hope. Hope for reconciliation. Hope she’d been mistaken – that she hadn’t been betrayed or hurt or misled or disappointed at her most vulnerable; that they hadn’t built trust, brick by brick, and then pushed her off it, hadn’t trained her out of her growling and tail-tucking and flinching, only to kick her in the ribs, swum her out to sea only to abandon her in its profundity. Maybe she’d hoped, deep down, that one day they’d return and rectify it, or she’d awake from the unreality of their absence. Disbelief, it’s the hope that there’s been some awful mistake.

How to Fall Out of Love, she’d once written. Hope is a double-edged sword plunged into my heart. Give up all hope, and with it your love will go.

Then why do you keep writing about them? Margaret had asked. You deserve novelty, life, not all these dead things you refuse to bury. You wear them like talismans, like tokens, like fragments of teeth and bone strung around your neck. You wear them like honour, like identity, but who are you if you take them off?

And Nora hadn’t known. Didn’t know.

The creature tucked a loose strand of hair behind Nora’s ear, and she dropped the autoprofígrafo, ducked beneath its arm and onto her knees, as when pulling weeds in the garden.

The creature’s inflamed eyes followed her, club feet shuffling to turn and keep her in view, neck stiff as though in a brace. It outreached a gnarled hand, bent a botched knee.

“I’m fine,” said Nora, clambering up from the carpet, autoprofígrafo in hand. She snatched her notebook from the desk and hurried into the bathroom. “I’ll be just a moment,” she assured, the creature’s eyes sulking like a dog’s in response, mouth ajar as though to speak, as Nora shut it out of view. Back against the door, she slid to the cold tiled floor, where she cracked open her notebook, the autoprofígrafo shaking above a pristine page.

She couldn’t kill it. Wouldn’t. And so, she’d have to kill whatever was keeping it alive: herself. The self who clung to the past, to the dead, to the corpses of lovers lost and things unsaid.

I grieve, she wrote, pen scratching against paper, the life I deserved to live but never could, the places where I was meant to be held but never was, where I ought to have been celebrated but had to shrink. I grieve who I was not allowed to be. Myself. My too-muchness, shunned, that was never too much.

And the grief, why can’t I let it go? Why do I wear it like a medal, polish my pain until it glitters? Giving up grief, maybe, means giving up the illusion that others were who they said they were, that they could, in fact, hold space, that nobody failed me, that I was never deprived anything. And if this illusion shatters, if I acknowledge that they did fail me, then I’m forced to relinquish control. If I’m not the problem, I can’t fix it. And so, I’ve long allowed myself to be the problem because it meant a solution: accommodating others, making myself smaller, more palatable. It meant that nobody let me down, and I could very happily point the finger at myself. The world’s safer that way; the world’s safer when you’re wrong.

But they did fail me. Over and over again. And that’s the wound. That’s why I cling to grief, to disbelief (hope!). I refused to believe their hands were too small to hold me, but that’s just it – I was never too big. Not for the right person, only for them. And the girl who failed to realise, it’s she who must die. And with her, so will they.

The autoprofígrafo clattered to the tiles, the paper absorbing its ink like a sponge, a blank page once more, empty, staring up at her.

Nora, empty, stared back, the door against her spine suddenly as palpable as the pages, almost pushing into her, the ground pulling at her. Gravity, real and conscious and loud. Grounded, she was, in the world of the living – head no longer in the clouds. She rose to her feet, pulled open the door, and found it there, the creature, still.

And she gasped, paralysed beside the bathroom door, eyes swallowing it in an instant, gulping it down like a bite too big. Its opaque grotesquery, repulsive and pitiful and tear-jerking and skin crawling, gradually faded like an illustration on paper, erased. The walls, the desk, the curtains, all filling its soft-edged silhouette, a boundary blurred between the living and the dead.

“I held on a little longer,” he said. “I held on to say goodbye.”

A boundary blurred between an it and a he.

Grief: it’s not meant to last forever. Relief, Nora felt, as she found herself alone once more, in her lamplit bedroom, autoprofígrafo trembling between her fingers.

“Goodbye,” she whispered, and somehow, somewhere, she believed he’d heard.

And then her knees buckled. She melted to the carpet. She burst into tears.