Prologue
Zoe
Like most of my dumb ideas, this one came from the internet.
Okay, the internet and insomnia.
Fine. The internet, insomnia, and wine.
I’d been lonely that night, stuck inside in deference to the miserable end-of-August heat and humidity, almost every day culminating in rolling thunder, heat lightning, flashes of pouring rain that did nothing to cool the air. My two best friends, Kit and Greer, were both unavailable for my proposed let’s-get-drunk-and-do-a-puzzle night—Kit was with her boyfriend Ben, newly reunited and too cute by half, and Greer had just left for a week-long Hawthorne family vacation. And I was still unwilling, over eight months since I’d quit in a blaze of jackpot-winning glory, to call up any of my friends from my former firm. Or maybe I was realizing, finally, that they hadn’t really been friends at all.
Lonely, a little drunk, and only a laptop for company? Truly, it was a recipe for disaster—or I guess for watching pornography—but instead I’d decided to try, once again, to get something going with my long-promised lottery-win project. An adventure, I’d told my friends on that night we’d bought the ticket, staking my claim for what I’d do with the cash. I’d imagined an around-the-world trip, something to take me away from everything familiar, something that would be different enough that I’d come out a whole new Zoe—more perspective, more peace, more something. But every time I’d tried to make a decision, every time I said to myself, Today, you plan your trip, I’d been paralyzed.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I’d said to Greer one night as we’d strolled through the travel section of the bookstore, a place—along with the gym, the park nearest my house, and my friend Betty’s restaurant—where I’d spent an embarrassing number of hours since leaving my job. “You’re in school. Kit’s bought the house. You’re doing it, doing what you said you’d do, and I’m—stuck.” Utterly and completely stuck.
“It’s a big change,” Greer had said. “Your whole life was your work. It takes time to recalibrate, right?” She’d paused, narrowed her eyes at the shelf in front of her. “‘Recalibrate’? I think I’ve been having dreams about Kit’s microscope. Let’s just buy a bunch of these books and see if we get any ideas.”
But the books hadn’t helped. Greer’s gentle encouragement hadn’t helped. Kit and Betty sticking labels to the dartboard at the bar with various place-names on it hadn’t helped, especially because I have superb aim. I was in a rut. I’d only ever felt like this once before in my life, and back then I’d dealt with it by doing something so insane and reckless that I knew I had to tread carefully this time, not fuck up my life—or someone else’s—again.
Maybe I’d been approaching it wrong, I told myself as I opened my laptop, smooshing myself into the corner of the couch, a lame, furniture-assisted cuddle that was the best I could get in my single state. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about a schedule, a set-in-stone path for this trip, and think about—inspiration. Pictures of places I wanted to see. Travel vibes, not travel plans.
So I’d navigated to some feel-good lifestyle site, the kind that shows you a bunch of food you should be cooking and crafts you should be doing to make your life fuller and happier and also more suitable for display on your Instagram. Never mind that my cooking is rudimentary and my last craft project was a noodle-jewelry box I made in third grade; never mind that I don’t even have an Instagram. Something about the possibility of such a lifestyle soothed me that night, and so there I was, clicking through a bunch of filter-heavy photos of artisanal kale and handwoven hammocks and fingerless-glove-clad hands wrapped around huge, latte-filled mugs, clever heart shapes foaming on top, forgetting, once again, all about my longed-for travel vibes.
Looking back, I wonder if I’d not only been drunk, but also perhaps stunned into some kind of nectarous, curated-lifestyle coma, because why in God’s name would I, Zoe No-Time-for-Bullshit Ferris, click on a picture of a “gratitude jar”? But there it was: a rustic-looking Ball jar, weathered pastel slips of paper with rough-hewn edges folded and tucked inside, and, so far as I could tell, several strands of completely unserviceable pieces of jute twine wound around the outside. Each day, the idea was, you record a good memory on a small slip of paper, fold it up, and put it in the jar. Then, when you’re feeling low, you extract one of those little shabby-chic scraps of joy from your jam jar and get on with feeling grateful about what life has handed to you.
Well. I certainly had well over a million reasons to be grateful, didn’t I? So why didn’t I feel any joy? Why couldn’t I just get on? Maybe, drunk-lonely Zoe had thought, I need the jar.
Of course, I didn’t have a jar, or twine, or antique-looking paper. I had a Baccarat Tornado vase and a stack of Smythson stationery. And somewhere between me cutting my cardstock into squares (not rough-hewn; are you kidding, I wasn’t that drunk) and actually putting pen to paper, the real idea—the dumb idea—had hit me.
What I need is a guilt jar.
It seemed so clear. It was the guilt that was keeping me from doing the trip, or from doing anything, really, since I’d taken home my share of the winnings. It was the guilt that was always there, ever since I was nineteen years old, piling on year after year, but now that I wasn’t working seventy hours a week, now that I wasn’t scheduling my free time down to the second, now that I’d been the beneficiary of the kind of luck I knew I didn’t deserve, I actually had time to really wallow in it. Sure, the wine wasn’t helping, but that night, I was brutally honest with myself: You’ve done wrong. And you need to fix it to move on.
After that, it’d been easy. On those little scraps of cardstock, I’d recorded my failures, starting with the comparatively minute. The time I made Dan cry at work. When I snapped at the Starbucks barista for not knowing my regular order. When I parked in one of those For New Moms Only spots at the grocery because I had menstrual cramps and it felt close enough. Forgetting my assistant’s birthday (2x). Avoiding eye contact with the homeless man who always sits outside Betty’s, even when I give him money. On and on, until it’d gotten trickier, until I’d had to get to the truly painful, did-you-even-drink-that-wine sobering ones. The ones I confined to names: first, names from the cases I was having such trouble forgetting. Then, names I wouldn’t ever forget:
Dad.
Mom.
Christopher.
At first I wasn’t exactly sure how the guilt jar would work. The gratitude jar was for contemplation’s sake, but the problem with my guilt was that I contemplated it pretty much every fucking night of my life, and so if I was going to get any joy out of this thing, I was going to have to do something other than simply look at my recordings. I was going to have to fix what I’d broken, or at least I was going to have to try.
Thanks to the lottery, I had means.
Thanks to my unemployment, I had time.
And that jar, it was going to give me the will.