Two thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine texts. Over the course of 625 days, I exchange 2,429 texts with my boss, Will. For the first 149 days, 88 percent of our texts are work-related. Like the twenty texts between us about…
I am not a writer who begins with an outline or even a vague idea of how I want a piece to end. I am a writer with a color-coded spreadsheet. That’s how I know the number of texts and the ratios of work-related to personal, of his to mine. I hoped the data would easily graph the development of this relationship, its dissolution, and my subsequent grief, and therefore end my obsession. The fact that I even have a spreadsheet makes the obvious more obvious. My obsession never ended; it was redirected.
When writing about this relationship, the hard data was always the focus, allowing me to hide behind numbers. Yet instead of providing answers, my meticulous audit was the catalyst to ask deeper questions that I did not know needed to be asked. Questions about the impact of this misled intimacy; the influence of long-denied, infanthood trauma; the discovery of absences that weren’t missed; and the permission to love and be loved. Well, shit. I hate when my therapist is right.
I write how my brain functions—logical, neurotic, connected, fragmented. “Solid Liquid Glass” follows that tendency more perfectly than if I had planned it. I write this way until I am able to balance pattern, precision, and nuance. I fixate on singular words for hours, striving for esoteric prose. I recheck the definition of esoteric every time I use the word. Because my inferiority complex feeds my superiority complex.
It would be false humility if I said, “I hope my writing touches just one person.” I want my words to impact as many people as possible (as long as I don’t know them in real life), giving them what I attempt to write into existence—self-empathy, self-validation, self-love. I want my words quoted in hundreds of Instagram posts created in Canva: #gutted
The antagonist of this story once asked why I wasn’t proud of my writing. The writing he had never read, the writing he will likely never read. I’m proud of this, and I couldn’t have written it without him.
LINH PRESTON is overeducated and underemployed, sometimes by choice. She is an orphaned, Vietnamese immigrant who forgets she is one, and a city girl living in the suburbs with her family. Her memoir-in-progress is a reckoning of and between obsession and love. Preston’s creative nonfiction may be found in The Sun’s “Readers Write” column, under the declined labels in her Submittable profile, and in sporadic posts on Instagram, where you can find her @thelinhpreston.
