Playworld

by Adam Ross

A word can open a world.

You’re going to stop listening and feeling and instead start making arguments, every day of your life asking yourself what isn’t instead of what is, and then it’s all over already. You’ll think you’ve bitten the apple, but really the apple’s bitten you. Your argument for what isn’t becomes the world and you become the argument and then it’s already happened: the beginning of adulthood.”

“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”

Because I could now name this feeling I’d been suffering, one that had dogged me of late, during our vacation and afterward, but that I recognized from all the way back to the fire. It had been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere—one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.

she called me almost every night, and I lived for these chances. It was like being her boyfriend’s understudy; it made me hope he’d actually break a leg. She, as if to increase my already terrible confusion, made me hope. She was so forthcoming and sweet I could, if I cauterized my heart’s ventricles, pretend to enjoy myself.

“You never marry the great love of your life,”

To give oneself over to another is best; to resist playacting is required. What anyone wants, standing before the beloved, is the person wholly themselves—which was close, I concluded, to holiness.

I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.

Is there a more fundamental mystery than the fact that a person can be so wise about others but so blind to himself?

“Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”

you can take two people, place them within shouting distance of each other, set them on their way, and in their lifetimes, they might never cross paths again. Even if it became their most fervent wish, having been separated, they could no more find the other among its infinite paths or spy the other reflected in its countless windows than an invisible man could find an invisible woman in an invisible city.