During my senior year at UO, I worked as a fiction editor for Unbound, the university’s literary arts magazine. It was my job to work with submitting writers to get their pieces ready for publication. Though, since I was the new kid on the editing team, most of my time was spent reading through submissions, some of them terrible enough to make my eyes bleed. But every once in a while a submission would come through with the kind of prose that made my insides ache with envy. Sometimes, it wasn’t just words arranged on a page. Sometimes, I would open up a submission and smell the fumes of gasoline and smoke after a furious car crash; hear the echoing cries of a sick child in my mind long after their passing; feel the searing tendrils of lust curling inside me from a passionate affair. Sometimes, I would get a sensory experience.

It was my semester working for Unbound that inspired me to write my own sensory experience. At first, I tried writing something completely fictional, a story about a detective who’s investigating a murder where her longtime lover is implicated. But I couldn’t seem to rein in the story. There were too many plot lines and plot holes, and none of it really made sense. Then I decided I would write a children’s book. It was safe. But I quickly realized it was too safe. I needed something a bit more challenging.

Then it dawned on me that the one project I was avoiding would probably be the most challenging project of them all: the story of us.

Over the past two years, I’ve written 227 pages in the as-yet-untitled story of Houston and me. But six weeks ago I reached the climax where everything falls apart and I can’t bring myself to write anymore. My mind knows how the story ends, but my heart is demanding a rewrite.

My mom brings me a steaming mug of black coffee, setting it down on the table in front of me. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asks, taking a seat at the other end of the sofa.

Skippy lies peacefully between us, having just ingested his morning ration of dog food and insulin.

“I switched with Kenny so I could stay home with Skip today on his first day back from the vet. Right, Skippers?” I scratch his shoulder and he stretches his arms and legs out lazily.

My mom rolls her eyes as she brings her cup of tea to her lips, takes a slow sip, then sets the mug down on the coffee table. She flips back her shoulder-length prematurely gray hair and leans back. She’s going to tell me what I should be doing today.

“You should be working on your book, not watching TV. Where’s your ambition?”

I grab my cup of coffee off the table and take a sip, mentally cursing my mom for knowing how to make coffee better than I do. “My ambition, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with why I’m not writing.”

“Are you stuck? Because you know I’d be glad to help you. Just give me a few pages and I’ll tell you why you’re stuck.”

My mother taught high school English for twenty-five years, until she retired a little more than three years ago. My parents’ divorce came about six months after Hallie died; just two weeks after Houston and I broke up. That was definitely the worst summer of my life. Then one year later, my mother retired. She declared her classroom days were over and she would be starting fresh, without my father.

I assumed this meant that she would finally write that novel she’d had kicking around inside her head for the past twenty-some years, but I was wrong. She’s spent the past three years trying to live vicariously through me. She desperately wants me to write my novel, though she has no idea if it’s actually any good, since I refuse to let her get anywhere near it with her English-teacher-eyes.

“I don’t need you to look at it. It’s not even edited. It’s a first draft. I just need to put it in a drawer for a while. Come back to it with fresh eyes in a month or two.”

My mother crosses one slender ankle over the other and purses her lips at me. “You’re so afraid I’ll hurt your feelings by insulting your writing. That actually hurts me, you know. I would never purposely tear apart your work.”

Yeah, she would never purposely tear it apart. Oops! What’s this dangling participle here and that cardboard character there? And how about this misguided attempt at theme? Really, Rory, you call this fiction? My mother is probably the perfect person to provide feedback on my novel, but she will never get her hands on it because it’s too personal. I don’t want her to know how deeply I fell.

“Fine. If you’re not going to write, then you need to get up and get out of those lady boxer shorts. Go find yourself a man so you can wear his boxer shorts.”

“Ew!” I shriek. “Don’t talk to me about that kind of stuff.”

“Oh, please, Rory. You’re twenty-four years old. You can have an adult conversation. You can’t keep denying yourself. We all have needs.”

“Double-ew. Please don’t talk to me about needs.”

She glances around the living room as she slides my mug aside and sits on the coffee table in front of me. “Maybe you should make one of those online dating profiles. You’re a beautiful girl, Rory.” She smiles as she reaches forward and pets my hair. “You’re smart. You’re self-sufficient. You’re healthy.”

“And I’m purebred.”

“Oh, Rory, stop making everything into a joke. Men will see it as a defense mechanism and they’ll wonder what you’re hiding.”

“I’m hiding from men. Isn’t that obvious?”

She sighs heavily as she lays her clasped hands in her lap.

“Okay, that’s enough, Mom. If you want to make an online dating profile, make one for yourself. Leave me and my defense mechanisms out of it.”

I stand from the sofa and scoop the coffee mug off the table to take it to the kitchen. I don’t know why I’m taking it to the kitchen, other than I need an excuse to get away from my mother.

She calls out after me. “You know, you have more than one soul mate in this world, Rory.” She pauses to let this sink in. “There really are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“Yeah, and most of them are slimy eels or boring sand dollars,” I shout back at her as I dump my coffee into the steel sink. “I want a smart, spunky dolphin. Is that too much to ask?”

A smart, spunky dolphin named Houston.

Just thinking these words makes me sick to my stomach.

My mom arrives in the kitchen with her tea mug. “A smart, spunky dolphin? Is that how you remember Houston? Because I remember him being an arrogant frat boy.”

After five years of hearing these kinds of insults directed at Houston, it still makes me as angry as it did the first time. “This conversation is over.”

She follows me out of the kitchen and I brace myself for more criticism as she trails behind me. “Rory, you don’t need to be ashamed for loving Houston as he was, but it’s been five years. You need to stop remembering him through the telescopic view of young love. You need to look at the big picture. At reality. And the reality is that he left you. He. Left. You.”

“That’s enough, Mom.” I stop in the hallway and round on her. “That’s. Enough.”

Her eyebrows knit together as she nods. “I’m sorry. I just want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy again.”

Why is everyone always trying to tell me what I deserve? My mom insists I deserve to be happy. Houston insists I deserve to decide whether or not he should sign a contract. It’s as if everyone knows something about me that I don’t know about myself.

I’m no more deserving of happiness than anyone else. I’m just a screwed-up girl with a billion stories racing through my mind on any given day. And only one story I really want to tell.