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“It’s after two in the morning there! What are you doing working?” Kamran shrugged. “Please stop pestering me about my vampirism.
stealing this line
She would need solitude. She had always needed enormous quantities of solitude—hours upon hours underwater, or on a depopulated beach. Anywhere, so long as it was lonely and away from others, to help her thoughts cohere. This place would help her solve the problem.
benthic
Ha remembered that younger self, so caught up in emotion, with loathing. That person was alien to her. Worse than alien, because that sixteen-year-old self was her, but at the same time was not her. Like a preconscious being. A thing that she had been.
i mean, who likes remembering their teenage years?
How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.
He was forcing himself to connect, to feel, to identify with others. Because people had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not matter.
It was not that she had not made friends, not found people she identified with, not laughed with other students in those cozy Oxford pubs, not gotten drunk with them, made out, built suitcase robots that toilet-papered rival dorms—it was that she had conducted all of that at a distance. There was the her doing those things, and there was, as if somewhere behind glass (for some reason she thought of the warped portholes of the ground transport unit), another Ha, always untouched, observing and never being observed.
serial killer vibes much?
She felt stupid. She wasn’t stupid—she was just not the kind of person who thought all the time.
girl, same
“Why didn’t you stay in Tibet?” “War broke out. War came to my home, and I knew I could use the skills I had learned to help my people.” “Yes—but after the war?” “After the war I wasn’t that person anymore.”
We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.
That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.
Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our killing, our tearing of minerals from the earth, our raking of the seas for more protein, our smelting of more metal, the collection of our trash, and the fighting of our wars—will rise up against us and take over. That is, humanity calls it fear. But it isn’t fear. It’s guilt.” “Guilt?” “Yes, guilt. It’s a revenge fantasy. We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make
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How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize?
Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.
Ha was on her feet. She felt the frustration flowing through her—the way it had when she was a child. The way it had here, on Con Dao, when she realized she would never have the love she wanted. That she could be less than unloved—she could be irrelevant. Could be no one at all to the person she cared about.
