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Otto says that as soon as people fall in love they’re already looking for a reason to hate each other. Because everyone you love is just another fragile pink joey, and cancer will eat them, or wolves, so no matter how much you hurt you’ll need to still look down at their dead body someday. On that day, your only comfort will be to say, “At least I won’t have to smell your horrid armpits anymore.” Or, “Thank goodness your ugly feet died with you.”
“Once the breakable things are broken,” Otto said, “then everyone can relax.”
And I say guppy here because guppies get on with what needs doing, don’t they? They don’t strike poses and spout a lot of high-minded speech about the duty one owes mankind to raise up truly exceptional offspring. No, guppies just off and eat their young.
His impulse is the same reflex what keeps a coyote from eating a diseased rabbit. It’s clear from our slinky, sex-kitten manner that Otto and I are the repository for broken chromosomes and bioaccumulating industrial solvents. We’re the legacy of fireproofed pajamas and nonstick cookware. We’re the product of off-gassing carpets and aluminum salts used by ancestors long before our conception. We’re everything infectious, looking to jump ship to a new host. We’re wee baby guppies swarming now to eat our parent guppy. And now we’re a family, aren’t we?
Curious it is, how we can simply live our lives while decades pass in a clock tick.
A person’s life must be given over to something, because the only people afraid of dying are those who’ve never lived.
