One Art
Fiction by Lota Erinne
Chioma had long been taken by the sting of deprivation. She relished the pain of going without. She called it the hole in her head. Her brain would spasm toward whatever minor vice she was rejecting, and she would wrap herself in the comfort of knowing she could resist.
It had begun in the early weeks of college, after she had finally caved to a caffeine addiction, then had to go without on a trip back home. No one in her house cared for coffee besides her father, and he got his fix at the office. There were cafés in her hometown, of course, but she was very lazy, and she appreciated the excuse to skulk around all week being a huge bitch to everyone. She felt free.
Though Chioma, predictably, spent that semester dabbling in drinking, her first experience with alcohol had come a few years prior. Her parents were off touring colleges with her older sister, leaving Chioma to drink half of a warm beer she found in the basement. There was a certain BAC, she knew, that optimized creative cognition—maybe this could help her unlock the literary genius her English teachers were so sure lurked within her? In the end, she scrawled two pages of gibberish and went to bed at three in the afternoon, thinking hazily that maybe there was a quiet honor in being a sober genius.
But her new roommates were encouraging, and the string of guys she thought she was into were persuasive, and then the string of girls she was actually into had such enviably developed palates. She found herself pretending to have tastes and opinions, which gradually gave way to actually having tastes and opinions—exhilarating, but in the end, no deterrent to simply downing whatever she found in the back of the freezer and surfing that feeling for the rest of the night. Shortly after her inaugural coffee break, she took two weeks off from drinking. She had long absolved herself of the worry that she was an alcoholic, too tired of debating her inner puritan to get to the bottom of anything but another bottle. Aside from the deep, visceral anxiety that unfurled heavily in her chest a few days in and faded shortly thereafter, the experience was unremarkable.
Her periods of abstinence came and went, steadily growing longer and larger. How did the poem go? Practice losing farther, losing faster: no weed, no porn, no sugar; a week, a month, then six. Her head fog cleared. She breathed a little easier. For the first time in years, she slept soundly through the night. And once resisting temptation dropped from an effort to a force of habit, the glow faded, and the vice returned. Chioma enjoyed her little asceticisms the same way she enjoyed the droplets of red that rose between her teeth whenever she remembered to floss. Her childhood dentist had told her that the blood was evidence of excess plaque and bacteria on the gums, left to accumulate without abandon.
“Floss every day,” she had chided, peering at Chioma over her pale blue face mask, “and you won’t have to worry about this anymore.” The air conditioner whirred behind her, filling the room with an ice-white chill. Chioma turned away from her dentist’s warm brown eyes and looked straight ahead—since she was fully reclined, this meant she was staring up at the ceiling, where a television was affixed. One of the Madagascar movies was playing soundlessly, without subtitles.
She didn’t know how to explain that the bleeding didn’t worry her at all. Not that it felt good, per se, but it read to her as evidence that she was making a positive change; she could gargle and spit and rinse the scarlet froth down her drain knowing that she was doing better today than she had yesterday. What did she stand to gain from a painless, bloodless ritual? She could explain none of this, because she was eight, and lacked the words, and also because the dentist had resumed poking around in her mouth with something cold and sharp.
Her friends teased her whenever she resumed her vices, as she always did. Long-term self-improvement wasn’t the point—it was knowing that she was stronger than her body, her desire, that she could crave something delicious to the point of despair and maintain the strength to deny herself. She learned to wait a few days beyond her self-imposed deadlines before reclaiming the vice du jour, all the better to demonstrate that she didn’t need it (whatever “it” may have been) that bad, and in fact hadn’t even realized that her sentence was up.
Her ritual served as her only constant through the string of odd jobs and bizarre sublets that followed graduation. When one super stopped answering her requests to please come fix her water heater, Chioma took it as a sign to stop indulging in long, hot showers and let the freezing temperatures shock her to life in the morning. If she was glad when her roommate returned from their backpacking trip and threatened to report their landlord to the city, that was neither here nor there. She stopped cussing and smoking and using social media when she was nannying and temping and waiting tables, respectively, and she rang in her first New Year in the city feeling firmly in control.
A sudden, sunny day in March found her on her third or fourth date with a tall photographer named Lea, who, at the moment, looked doubtful.
“Is that any good?” she asked, eyeing the bean burger coming apart in Chioma’s hands. Chioma had given up meat for Lent, which felt a bit on the nose, but she had never done a vegetarian stint and had also never put herself through Lent. So she was breaking new ground.
A woman with a ponytail the same white-blonde as her golden retriever hustled past, her boots clicking decisively on the sidewalk. Why is she wearing heels to walk her dog? Chioma wondered as Lea offered up her own lunch, a BLT that smelled heavenly. “Do you want to try mine?”
Chioma hadn’t told anyone about this particular jaunt, as had been another habit of late, even though she was thoroughly motivated by external validation. At first, she had made much of her periods of abstention. She wasn’t after congratulations. She liked how her friends had rolled their eyes and made snide comments whenever she waved away a joint or skipped out on a McDonald’s run. Chioma the martyr. Sister Chioma. Saint Chioma. The religiosity of these monikers didn’t escape her; it thrilled her. Despite having outgrown her belief in God some time before middle school, the fervor of the Nigerian churches that her family had ping-ponged between in her youth had left its impact. For all her experience breaking with routine, she couldn’t stop herself from praying before every meal or bargaining with a higher power to help her out every now and then. Maybe God wasn’t real, but it still felt good for others to position her at his side.
She did try to be a good feminist and refer to God with strictly female pronouns, but if she was honest with herself, the image that sprang to mind at the mention of all things holy came straight from one of the strange DVDs she had found in the rec room of her favorite church. She and a few friends would sneak back under the guise of heading to Sunday School while the adults were occupied by disseminating amongst themselves the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. They would democratically select a DVD from the small, peeling bookshelf upon which the TV was perched and watch whatever it held, whether it was a poorly animated rip-off of Disney’s Robin Hood, a poorly animated adaptation of an arcane fairy tale of indeterminate ethnic origin, or a poorly animated retelling of a Bible story that they had all known since birth.
In one such retelling, God had appeared much as Chioma had always envisioned him: broad-chested, majestic, with tan skin and flowing white hair. The only difference was that this God lacked the low, booming tones often attributed to him. His voice was curiously high, just short of effeminate, and as he called upon Abraham to stay his hand and let Isaac live, Chioma was faintly reminded of the most popular tenor in her theater club. This God’s image stayed with her in her dreams and daydreams, and sometimes appeared when she touched herself. She supposed that she should have felt ashamed at masturbating with the specter of God hovering before her, but it elevated her experience.
When one of the adults finally questioned who exactly was in charge of this so-called Sunday school, it quickly became clear that there was no Sunday school at all, and the group had been disbanded and forced to sit through the sermons as God, apparently, intended.
Here, now, Chioma regarded Lea’s offering and shook her head, smiling as enticingly as she knew how while lapping up the mash of burger that was sliding down her wrist. Chioma hadn’t dated much in the past year, having had her heart thoroughly broken by someone she had once considered a friend of a friend. They had drifted toward each other without ever noticing until, after a series of movie recommendations and long car rides upstate and afternoons spent pretending to care for contemporary art, they were fully intertwined.
It was for the best, this indeliberate approach. Chioma knew that she was awkward and unpleasant on first dates. Conversation that had once flowed freely sputtered and stalled; eye contact was anathema. She just couldn’t build rapport or feel tenderness for a person when all she knew about them was that they expected her to be building rapport and feeling tenderness. She was happy to let love creep in like the stray cat she had fed and gotten fixed and brought in on especially cold nights, only realizing at a friend’s insistence that it had, at some point, become her pet. And while Wasabi still spent her days lounging in the sunlight that slanted across Chioma’s bed, the situation with the former friend of her former friend had shattered so severely that she couldn’t introspect even if she wanted to. Her brain had bleached itself of the memory—a protective measure. The two of them moved in concentric circles now, Chioma lengthening her own radius ever further to avoid any backyards or cafés or record stores that carried her specter.
After finishing their lunch, Chioma and Lea strolled around the park. The sun beamed kindly through the bare branches and the chill that persisted, warming their hands and the backs of their necks. Spring wasn’t fully in the air, not yet, but the breeze hummed with it. Two teenage girls scurried past, hugging their bare, goose bumped arms and giggling about someone named Paul. A clump of tiny purple flowers bloomed at the base of a gnarled elm, huddled around the trunk as if embarrassed at having shown up so early. Chioma listened to Lea’s account of some drama that had gone down on set earlier that week between a stylist and another photographer, one of whom, Chioma dimly recalled, was Lea’s ex. The gravel crunched underfoot.
“So you’re a vegetarian?” Lea asked some minutes later, as they leaned on the railing overlooking the lake. A few ducks bobbed in the tide, while others pecked in the damp soil at the water’s edge. Across the water, a group of boys made their way along the path—some on scooters, one slowly pedalling his bike, a few more shoving each other on foot. Lea poked Chioma and smiled down at her, revealing the wide gap between her top front teeth. This was Chioma’s first time seeing her without her hair straightened, and her glossy black curls fell softly about her face, stopping just under her chin. “How has this not come up before?”
“Because I’m not,” Chioma answered. “This isn’t a permanent thing; I’m just taking a break. It’s just something I do.” She winced internally at her overuse of the word “just.” She knew that she was undercutting herself, or projecting uncertainty, or whatever.
“You quit meat sometimes?” Lea asked. “Like a T-break?”
“No, I haven’t quit meat before. Other stuff.” She squinted one eye as the clouds shifted and the sun emerged, taking direct aim at her face. “I take breaks.” Lea waited patiently, pulling out the joint they had smoked half of before lunch and relighting it. Chioma kept her eyes on the gleaming ember, self-conscious about her pattern for the first time. People broke bad habits and adopted better ones all the time, she knew, but the return to routine was normally an inadvertent backslide, not a planned obsolescence. How could she explain herself? Lea, perhaps noticing the tension in Chioma’s face, exhaled and kissed the spot on Chioma’s forehead where she knew a worried wrinkle was beginning to form. They exchanged the joint and both turned to look outward, leaning against each other and watching the wind sweep the smoke away from them.
As her courtship with Lea churned and developed, so too did Chioma’s habit. She couldn’t help it; it seemed that the closer the two of them became, the more rigidly she had to conduct herself in other areas. She quit drinking for a spell, then went two months without hitting the snooze button on her phone in the mornings. She quit movies, then TV, then movies again. She quit picking at the scab on the back of her knee until it had almost healed, and then she resumed.
Lea hardly noticed, which Chioma considered either a deep affront or a great relief, according to the weather. She was solid and sedate, and she never hurried anywhere—as she explained to Chioma, this was partially because, as a child, she had internalized the mantra that a lady should never be seen running, and partially because she was always, always on time. She had to be touching Chioma when they were together: pinky fingers interlocked, a hand on the back of her neck, a foot hooked absentmindedly around her ankle. Her emotions never flared, and they argued infrequently, largely because Chioma hated Lea’s ever-present need to have the last word. A tight, hot fist of anger rose in her whenever they bickered. It knocked past her heart and rattled the bars of her ribcage; it thickened her tongue and jammed up the back of her throat. She stopped arguing back and threw out all the junk food in her pantry and tried not to think about it.
Where, at first, Chioma had only abstained from common vices like nose picking and doomscrolling, the hole in her head grew vaster. Sentimentality, grief, concern—they all tumbled into the cavern in turn, where they crouched out of reach until she felt they deserved to emerge. She was caught in a storm and soaked to the bone, her laptop ruined, her sketchbook turned to paste, and she felt nothing. The trees lining her street burst into flower, some of the tiny, white-petaled wonders springing directly from the bark, and she felt nothing. One drowsy morning, on the train to work, she spotted the architect of her previous heartbreak holding hands with someone she didn’t recognize until they turned around.
Thick, low eyebrows. Full lips on the verge of a smile. The architect pressed a kiss against the top of their head and another against those lips, trembling with laughter, and Chioma turned away. She watched the doors slide closed and realized she had missed her stop. She rode along for another half hour before texting her boss that she had woken up vomiting, and rode an hour more before she finally started to make her way home. Her boss responded that he hoped she felt better soon and that a simple “I’m sick” would suffice next time. She felt nothing.
While Chioma hadn’t expected her bouts of emotional abstinence to register outwardly, she was eventually held accountable. Lea, she had learned, was an excavator. She would dig and dig and sift through the rubble as though something of value lay beneath. Chioma had never considered herself especially withholding, but she skirted these probes more pointedly the more they came about. She especially hated when Lea would ask about what she called Chioma’s bad habit. “How’s the bad habit?” she would tease after a kiss hello or in the midst of a blissful silence. “What aren’t you doing today?”
What was so bad about building resilience? About sharpening the blade of will against the whetstone of desire? Lea had crafted herself perfectly. She was utterly enviable: artistic, successful, self-assured. Always in control. How could she, of all people, not appreciate the power Chioma wielded over herself? How couldn’t she see that it was the closest she could come to deserving her?
“Have you ever considered,” Lea asked one day, “that maybe you’re addicted to abnegation? That maybe the dopamine rush you get from dropping a habit is, in fact, the most potent of them all?” Chioma craned her neck to look down at the person who had, at some point, become her girlfriend. They were curled up on Lea’s faded blue couch, watching animal documentaries. Sir David Attenborough offered his mild commentary on a polar bear’s brutal mutilation of a leopard seal. Lea’s roommate clanged around in the kitchen as he always seemed to be doing, emitting sounds and smells and splatters that far exceeded any apparent culinary output. Chioma tickled Lea just under her ribcage to stall for time.
“I just mean,” Lea shrieked, forging bravely on while contorting away from Chioma’s grasp, “that all this stopping and starting is just emotional binging and purging, but somehow in reverse. Like, okay, you can quit drinking for a year and start drinking again. You can go a month without watching TV. But then what?” The scene on screen had pivoted to dark blue water, an orca slicing cleanly through the waves. “And,” Lea pressed on, “don’t you hit a wall at some point? You keep dropping the same things over and over—are you getting anywhere?”
Chioma knew she wasn’t. She had known it as a child, and as she was growing, and the knowledge closed in on her now. The crumbs in the couch cushions prickled against her thighs as she slid away. Something hard and cold creaked down inside her like a garage door, shutting out the world and closing her in with the broken tools and exhaust fumes, the abandoned projects, the rusty tricycles long outgrown. Chioma watched from inside as she laughed with Lea, said something just beyond her own hearing. Probably agreed. Made some excuse—working late? An early morrning?—and kissed her goodbye. She steered the ship of herself out the door and down the street.
In a dim, noisy bar, sitting high on an uncomfortable stool, Chioma took stock of her situation. Her aches and pains, her money troubles, the solidity of her sadness—she didn’t waste any time retreading these waters. She was tired of dropping more and more into the void, tired of manufacturing closure. So she could seal herself off from the urges pressed up within her—so what? A well-dressed crowd of thirty-somethings crashed noisily into the bar, fresh out of work and just in time for happy hour. Chioma closed her eyes and let their camaraderie wash around her. She took one more step inside herself and locked the door behind her.
Lota Erinne is a writer and editor based in New York City. They are an editorial assistant at Penguin Random House, a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Dykes and Dolls, and the host of Inter Alia, a new reading series. Her work can be found in pinky magazine and on her Substack, Locked & Lota'd.