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Weeks later, after some false starts, he is standing in the vestibule of his former favorite restaurant when a woman enters behind him, a short young twentysomething in a yellow smock with little pin-tucked ruffles, her collarbones lightly pied by sunburn. He stands aside to hold the door for her, and she thanks him. In spite of his resolve, he smiles back and nods courteously at this small final vindication, before pulling on his ski mask, shrugging the backpack from his narrow shoulders, and following her in.
Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.
You want to drag people down into the mud with you. And when it backfires, because why would it not backfire, you fall back to your bunker of victimhood.
Her anger cremates away all her affection for him, but not the obsession, leaving her a scorched skeleton of wrath.
Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test—what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately.
When a stranger’s pool cue comes too close to her face she slaps it to the floor.
Love that connection from the first story!!!
Stale loveless boring endless dread: not even of death, merely the petty fear of becoming older and ever less likely.
After many years she will see the whole saga not as a tragedy but as the beginning of a horrific process of self-understanding, at the end of which she will accept that whether or not it has been her choice, to be and feel nothing will be all that has made life possible.
Noah makes active listening sounds at all the wrong moments, which only emphasizes how actively he is not listening.
Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible.
“No no, you’re good, it’s all good! I like learning what you’re into, it’s cool, it’s a process. But like, this, it’s just that this is all very—specific! Feels like I’m sucking off Stanley Kubrick over here, ha ha . . . oh hey, come on, that was a joke! Hey! Hey.
These are my goals, I said: the instant I hit retirement at age 40, I want to start having kids, just like you do—as many at a time as IVF will safely allow, until we hit a dozen. (Four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and feasible.) I want us all to live under the same roof, in a big “mothership” that takes care of our every need. Alison would be the household COO, running admin and housework, which she obviously enjoys, and I’d be CEO, overseeing our kids’ education from birth. We’ll wake up at 5 a.m., chug our shakes, engage in physical and mental enrichment,
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All that time she could’ve been pushing toward our freaking dope future together, she spends on arts and crafts and a weird poem?
So I told her, I’m sorry, I just don’t see a path forward for us, so I have to let you go, and although we were not able to achieve our goals together, I wish you the best on your journey wherever it takes you, may your time on Earth be prosperous AF, and you can keep the pink towel if you want.
example—if everything I did was so evil, how is it that up until now not a single person ever told me No?
When I was a baby she would pinch my nose for 15 minutes every night so it’d grow in strong and narrow, then lay me in the crib face-down, risking SIDS so the back of my head wouldn’t be flat. Even by Asian standards she was a skincare ultra, and at restaurants wouldn’t sit near any sunlight, not even reflected off a wall.
and he gave me $22 in a wad of ones and change, which by the conversion rate of childhood made me a millionaire.
At the time I considered this part of the crucible of coexistence, and I was the greater deceived by Craig’s endless, nonjudgmental tolerance for my complaining. My pathetic ass mistook this for real concern, real recognition, I never questioned why I felt so wrung-out afterward, had yet to realize he was jabbing a straw into my navel and drinking deep to nourish his throbbing tumor of guilt.
picture. Whenever anyone said anything annoying, it took seconds to find some unfortunate rap lyric or solution to “the homeless problem” or opinion on a celebrity’s body. What’s nice is anyone who’s been online long enough always has dirt, every post is like talking to the police. And once people are onto you, dirt occasions more dirt, the whole place becomes a dragnet, every vestige of your past scrutinized with maximum cynicism, toward the goal of furnishing more proof of malevolence.
Wi-Fi. Some demagogue or dumbass leans a little too hard into their worldview, or relates some lapse in manners as a boastful anecdote, and out pops their legacy, an instant designation of global antagonist. The dogpile a ritual sacrifice, collective ills concentrated and purged in a single exemplary sinner. Like Gator Lady, like Bean Dad. Just the phrase himbo is ableist makes my nerve endings sparkle like
Oddly I’ve hit the point where I’m too depressed to scroll the internet, which is like being too hungry to eat.
Sharing your diseased inner life is so common and incentivized that any information not willingly volunteered seems deliberately suppressed. Whereas if I confessed a mass murder the cycle would flip within a week. Another puritan holdover, I think: this forced admission, followed by cleansing denunciation. (But I would think that—I’m from Western Mass.)
If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.
How the only way to pass through a hall of mirrors and know by the end which you is you is to obfuscate.
or worn me down into the compliance I always feared was my destiny.
could it be because the more identifying particulars you assign to him, the more he might come to resemble you?
(It’s noteworthy that not only Kant, but every protagonist winds up a writer of some sort, committing acts of grotesque self-exposure—and self-destruction—by text.)
The only thing more boring, exhausted, and self-indulgent than breaking the fourth wall at the end of a story is pointing it out.
You doubtless know the cliché about how every rejection is God’s protection—not to be almighty about it, but you should accept our passing as more of a reprieve than a misfortune. It hurts to be read. When people don’t like it, that’s terrible and nothing can be done. And even when they do, they usually do so for the wrong reasons, project what isn’t there, draw the wrong conclusions, form the wrong idea about why it was written, which is just as disheartening and alienating as any rejection.
Doesn’t it seem nicer to nobly forgo publication, something to be squinted at only to be smothered or smeared, in favor of a testament to yourself, that draws its meaning and worth from its sublime invisibility to others, the same way only you know what your heart feels like?
Because the final irony, one that at least your writing seems to grasp, is that rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you—the reject—must hear, and comprehend, and accept.
