Chapter 1 : Part 1

Five Things I Can't Live Without
by Holly Shumas

On paper, Nora's life looks perfect. She's moving in with her boyfriend Dan, she has a stable job and a great group of friends. But she's stuck in what she refers to as 'meta-life,' the plight of overthinking and secondguessing to the point of self-sabotage. One day at work, Nora decides to thwart her meta-life by following her instincts. In what feels like a moment of revelation, she quits her job.

Immediately, her meta-life goes into overdrive: What on earth was she thinking - and what is she going to do now? Fortunately, when a friend asks Nora to rewrite her Internet dating profile, she realizes that not only is she good at it, but she really enjoys it. Billing herself as a Cyrano de Bergerac for the lovelorn, Nora finally begins to find professional success.

But soon, Nora's meta-life has latched onto the question she's asked so many clients: What are the five things she can't live without? Is her flourishing business one of them? Is Dan? With each new client and each step she takes in her own relationship, she must confront her biggest demon - her self-sabotaging 'meta-life.' But will she be able to slay it forever?

Chapter 1

Here's when I knew it had gone too far.

My kitchen window was stuck, and I was trying to open it. No mental gymnastics required, just simple physical action. There I was, starting to sweat with the effort, and the normal reaction would be, Wow, this is harder to open than I thought, possibly accompanied by some annoyance. Maybe the normal person would have been dimly aware that it smelled ever so faintly like cat turds because it was an unusually hot day and the litter box was sitting directly under the kitchen window - a spot that had been chosen because, in theory, that window opens while the living room "windows" are just floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. And the normal person might even go so far as to think what a glaring design flaw that is in an otherwise pretty decent apartment. What the normal person wouldn't do is what I did. Which was to think all those things, plus:

Why is everything always so hard? Why can't anything just open for me? Maybe this window is the symbol, and this is the key moment in my life. Maybe this is who I am and who I'll always be: some neurotic twenty-nine-year-old woman living with a roommate and her roommate's obese cat, not even having what it takes to commit to a cat of her own, or what it takes to open a window.

But that's not true. I won't always be twenty-nine. And in two weeks, I'll be living with Dan. Poor Dan. He doesn't deserve this crap, all the crap involved in living with me, living with me while I live in my head.

Oh, man! That's what this is! This is me, living in my head right now. Stop it! Sometimes a window is just a window. Stop it! Why can't I just perform a simple physical action without stepping outside of myself and wondering about it all?

Stop asking yourself questions!

All the while, as I careened from irritation to despair to rage, I was tugging at the window. It must have been the adrenaline from my anger that made the window suddenly yield. The cooling breeze rushed in and I thought, Well, that should feel nice.

I slumped to the kitchen floor just as the phone rang.

"Hey, you." It was Dan.

"Hey," I said, slightly dazed from the physical and mental exertion that had just taken place.

"You sound funny. What's going on?"

"I'd feel silly if I told you." I felt silly anyway. "What's going on with you?"

"I just got a lead on some moving boxes. This obsessive guy I work with actually breaks down and stores all his moving boxes in his garage, and he said he'll loan them to us." I noted how upbeat Dan sounded. He's one of those people who enjoys the little things, doesn't sweat the small stuff, etc.

"Meaning we have to return them?" I said. Yes, I generally do sweat the small stuff, sometimes quite literally. I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead.

"Yeah. And we can't write on them, either. You know how normally you write in Magic Marker, 'kitchen' or 'bedroom'? Well, we need to work with the existing writing. If it says 'bedroom' on it, that's where you're packing your socks."

"Okay," I said. "Cool!" I realized I was overcompensating; no one sounds that enthusiastic about used moving boxes. On loan.

"Nora, what's wrong?" Dan's voice was somehow warm and expressionless at once. He was remarkable that way. Even-keeled, that's what my mother had said when I first told her about him. She'd said it approvingly. She thought I needed someone like that "to balance me out," like my stepfather, Ed, does for her. It infuriated me because I suspected she was right.

"I went to open the window, and it wouldn't open, and while I was trying to open it, the whole time, I was thinking and thinking and thinking, analyzing and analyzing, and - " It all came out in one angsty, humiliating rush.

"Nora," he broke in firmly, "you're doing it again."

"It" meant leading my meta-life. Meta-life is the opposite of living in the moment. It's the syndrome of simultaneously having an experience and being an observer commenting on and questioning the experience. By observing something, you change it, sometimes for the better, but in my experience, usually for the worse. You know you're in the meta-life when you're critiquing an experience while you're having it ("This is fun but it would be more fun if . . ."), trying to talk yourself into happiness because you should feel it ("It's a beautiful day, and all I really need to be happy are fresh air and sunshine"), or worrying that you're not getting any closer to the Big Important Things ("Sure, this is a great date, but what are the odds this guy would ever marry someone like me?").

"I know," I responded miserably. "I know I'm doing it again. That's the worst part. I know, and I do it anyway."

"What could you possibly be thinking while opening a window except 'arghhh'?"

"Oh, you'd be amazed."

"Try me."

"No," I said, shoring my resolve. "I'm not going to talk about it. I'm going to get on with my day."

Copyright © 2007 by Holly Shumas

About the Author

I grew up dreaming of being a writer. I woke up after two semesters at an MFA program in creative writing. There are people who are born writers, I decided, people for whom it's write or die. And for me, it just wasn't like that. I could live without it.