Something in the Water

“I give it a second. I let the muscles of my face fall as he studies me. I let my pupils contract like the universe imploding and calmly reply, ‘No.’ No, I’m not real. It’s scary. I’ve only done it a few times. Absented myself from my own face. Made myself disappear. Like a phone reverting to factory settings.” 

This passage comes while Erin and Mark are on their mini-vacation for their anniversary. Mark asks Erin if she’s real, which Erin interprets as him wondering if their life is real because it seems too good to be true. This passage is ironic for a couple of reasons. First, whether Mark never truly loved Erin or if his job loss led him to a spiral, things were too good to be true at this early point in the story, and they only get worse. Second, Erin makes herself appear unreal here by taking the emotion from her personality. By the end of the book, Erin is real, but many of the circumstances surrounding her are not. Mark turns out to be a different person than she thought, and the plane people hide themselves so completely that they might as well not exist.

“I feel a brief shiver of freedom. I’m not in that washroom with Mark. The whole world is still open and clear for me. It’s not my problem.

The guilt follows immediately. What an awful thing to think. Of course it’s my problem. It’s our problem. We’re getting married in a couple of months. But I can’t make that feeling stick. I don’t feel Mark’s problems like I feel my own. What does that mean? I don’t feel like something devastating has happened. I feel free and light.”

Erin subconsciously pulls away from Mark long before his betrayal ever begins. This passage shows how she thinks more about herself than she does him, which is not an ideal quality in a relationship and might have contributed to the breakdown of their love/Mark’s change of feelings. Mark and Erin push one another away, if in different ways and to different extents.