How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing—or giving up—its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe.

Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.

I generally like to think of myself as pretty empathetic, but for some reason my reaction to crying has always been like this. It’s hard for me to watch and just generally stresses me out so much that my initial response is to get mad, and then of course I feel like a monster, which is immediately followed by guilt, oh, the guilt.

He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.

I could put a number on something but that isn’t going to make any of it any better, a number that doesn’t correspond to what my mother felt, all the way right up to the end, before she stopped having new feelings and became content to have the old feelings over and over again.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens.

Chronodiegetics is the branch of science fictional science

Mostly highlighting re: "science fictional science"

Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system.

He was never happier than when he could walk me through a problem, from beginning to end, knowing at each juncture what the next step would be.

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.

It didn’t look attractive and well formatted, the kind of thing a kid’s eye would be drawn to; it looked like it came from a typewriter, unevenly spaced, like there was too much text, too many ideas and words and things that someone had to say, had to let people know about, it looked like it came from the mind of a brilliant, lonely, forty-year-old man, sitting somewhere in his basement in that faraway state, half crazy, sure, but on to something.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire. Not a unidirectional arrow, not causal, as in, desire leads to suffering. Desire is suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering is desire.

You don’t always have your own best interests at heart.

They’re all here in this corridor, good memories and bad, humiliations and accidents and even small victories, each tableau playing out like the movement of silent, benthic sea life, viewed through the viscous and refractive medium of the years in between, in some cases dim and obscured, and others relatively clear, but never completely transparent, at best suggestions, outlines, emotions and echoes, impressions as relived through the deepest and darkest of waters.

For a while here, it looked like we were going to make it. Whatever it is. Whatever making it is.

If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.

Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Seventeen years old is not old, but it is old enough to have hurt your father.

I am an epsilon–delta proof, I am the limit of my own past self