Building My Life Novels & Stories

The kind in the Miriam-walking-a-staircase-to-test-it, in the Colin understanding that the building had to trust itself, in the chain of the attending continuing through the professional and the personal simultaneously, one practice, one life. He was building something. He was always building something. He returned to the library notes and wrote until six, and the January dark settled over the city outside the window, and the bones of the building were rising in the ground across the city, honest in the January light. End of Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

“Pass my classes.” I take a shaky breath. “Graduate.” Another breath. “Get a decent job.” My voice drops. “Make a better life for myself.” There it is. The thing I’ve been chasing for years. The thing everything has always been about. Not popularity. Not relationships. Not parties. Survival. Building something better. Building something stable. Building something that didn’t disappear every time life got difficult. I finally look at him. “And now?” My laugh sounds almost hysterical.

I simply uttered. I didn't notice that the time passed already, the director immediately called everyone to start the scene one more time. My makeup artist retouched my makeup first before we continued. And from that moment on, I made sure I delivered my lines perfectly like I usually do. I made my scenes flawlessly that day. After almost a month, I bought a condominium somewhere within the city. I thought about it and I guess it's not safe for me to stay with my mom for a long time. She receives multiple phone calls from Damian and his mother asking where I am.

Ethan leaning against the counter with his coffee watching the three of us with the expression he wore when he was exactly where he wanted to be. I set my glass down. Looked at the table. At the bottle and the glasses and the orange juice and the kitchen that had been assembled from nothing, from a concept paper and a jar of tips and a hostel room and a library notice board and one bag and a child nobody wanted me to keep. This kitchen. This Saturday. This life. I built this. Every single piece of it. And it was worth every single day it had taken.

I thought about seven days. I thought about the rest of my life waiting on the other side of the thing I had built toward, and the door in the armor, and the specific quality of a person who had learned to build things carefully and was now, finally, beginning to understand that the most important thing left to build was the version of herself that knew how to live inside what she had built. I started walking. Noah was meeting me for dinner at seven. I walked toward it. Not away from anything. Toward. There was a difference. I had always known that. Today I felt it.

“You know what’s strange?” “What?” “I can actually imagine it now.” God. Not fantasy. Reality. Children. Family dinners. Years. And somehow none of it frightened her anymore. The wind softened around them while rain threatened faintly in the distance. Then Adrian whispered thoughtfully: “You know what I realized recently?” “What?” “We already built the emotional part.” Silence. “Now I think we’re just building the life around it.” God. That physically settled into her chest. Because yes. The foundation already existed:

The controlled life, the managed interior, the careful distance. That had been maintenance, not building. She was building now, had been building for two years, and the building was better than the maintaining in the way he had said, fuller somehow, more present in itself. She was building a life. That was the thing she had been afraid of for thirty years and was now simply doing. The large things had become the floor and the floor was solid and she was building on it. End of chapter 54

She writes: The shape of the second life from the long view. The first decade: construction. The ROTC, the commission, the file, New York, the practice being built. The work of building requires attention to the building rather than to the thing being built. At ten years you can see it for the first time — you step back and there it is. I did not know it was going to be what it was. I built it from the instructions that the first life left in me.

I had always had a good eye for structure. Beckett had told me that. In a different life before Portland he had said you have an annoying habit of rearranging furniture and what he had meant was you see spaces clearly and you understand what they could be and I had understood what he meant even then. I was going to build something with that. Something real. Something under my own name. On the other side of everything. Soon. And knew that Griffin was right. It was time.

"Head home, Hank. You don't need to clock in until my investigation is done." I nodded and left. However, I did not expect the internet to be filled with negative news about me the very next day. An article suddenly appeared with the headline, 'Eldest Lane son starts fire for money.' The article went on and on about how I hooked up with unethical companies to start a fire as a way to end the competition. My parents seized the chance to cry and complain about how I was a violent tyrant and a bully at home who targeted Richard. I became a pariah overnight.