Familiaris

by David Wroblewski

“there are times you need a roof, and there are times you need a road.”

Everyone was in some way weak, Mary knew; everyone had some defect of character, some tendency toward illegitimate action. But only a tendency. Bad behavior required weakness, provocation, and opportunity. Subtract any one of these ingredients and the weak remained virtuous—in deed, if not in thought.

“The mind is not a bullet, hurtling toward logicality, but a teakettle, boiling only after an era of discomfort and effervescence.”

It’s simpler than that: you haven’t gotten dirty yet. You haven’t lost anything you care about. You’re still a child, with a child’s belief that playing fair and working hard will protect you from anything. Because nothing has gone wrong, you think that’s proof you’re right. But the question isn’t whether something serious has or hasn’t gone wrong. Something always does, sooner or later. The question is, who will you become once you get dirty?”

The grain was beautiful, the wormholes an unforgivable flaw. This was always the way with wood: the tree concentrated its most creative growth around its worst injuries.

It reconciled nothing, only twisted opposites together like strands of barbed wire: certainty and doubt, familiarity and strangeness, abundance and scarcity, order and aberration.