Playworld

by Adam Ross

Mom never lied to us. This characteristic cut two ways: you had to be careful what you asked her.

Still others marry their problems rather than another person. So for them, cheating on their spouse is like a vacation from a job they hate but are too afraid to quit.”

“But mostly, infidelity is a case of what I like to call the practical use of other people.” He began walking again. “We start to feel invisible to the person with whom we’re most intimate. We desperately want to be seen by them. But rather than address it with our partner and, God forbid, risk them ignoring us, we instead seek to become the apple of someone else’s eye, which causes us to drift further from our beloved until they finally notice our absence. Or don’t. Which confirms our invisibility either way.”

These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal.

“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.”

But there’s no freedom in doing the opposite, okay, because always doing the opposite is automatic. It binds you to the person you’re trying to break away from. It intertwines you with the very thing you profess you don’t want to be.

So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”

“Maybe that’s how you deal with your fear,” he said. “Of what?” “Of someone liking you. If you’re always chasing someone unavailable, then you’re unavailable to everyone else.”

“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.”