A story · House of Bridges
The Text She Rewrote Nine Times
It is 11:40 on a Sunday and Marnie has been writing the same message for two hours. You choose what she sends. Four endings — one of them will be the one you have sent yourself.
Hey — sorry to bring this up again, but that thing at dinner did land a bit weird for me. No big deal though! Hope your week is good x
It is 11:40 on a Sunday. Marnie is sitting on the edge of her bed with one shoe still on, because she came upstairs to get changed two hours ago and got stuck here instead, and the phone has gone dim in her hand four times.
Draft one, at 9:48, said something completely different.
What you said tonight was cruel and you knew it was cruel when you said it.
That draft lasted about ninety seconds. She read it back and heard how it would sound to him — dramatic, is the word she used in her own head — and started again.
Draft three softened cruel to unkind. Draft five moved the apology to the front, because she has learned that a sentence which begins with sorry gets read all the way to the end. Draft seven added the exclamation mark. Draft eight took out the word hurt and put in weird, which is a smaller word, a word you can laugh off if it isn't received well.
Draft nine added the x.
What actually happened, for the record, since the record is the one thing that keeps going missing: they were at a table with four other people, and she told a story about her job, and Theo waited until she got to the good part and said "is this the version where you're the hero again?" — and everyone laughed, because it was funny. It was genuinely funny. He is very funny. And she laughed too, a beat late, and then she went to the bathroom and stood with her hands on the sink for a while.
In the car he said she'd gone quiet. She said she was tired.
That was four hours ago and she has been holding the sentence ever since, turning it, filing the edges off it, making it a shape that can be handed to him without anything of hers showing on it.
Her thumb is over the arrow.
Somewhere underneath the drafting, running the whole time like a tap left on in another room, is the actual question — the one she is not going to ask tonight and possibly not this year:
why do I have to make it this small before I'm allowed to say it?