Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

You see, what those kids over there”—he pointed at the empty booth—“don’t realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them.

“What do you think happiness is? It’s a mode of consumption. It’s not a fixed state, somewhere you can take a cab to.

“There are times in life when it’s good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”

When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent. When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

And by free I mean that I felt free to pursue the life I wanted, and I could afford to.

“It was confusing because I didn’t know what I was yet.” “Does it get better?” I asked. Can it? was what I really wanted to ask. “Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”

“You need to do more than keep an eye out for incongruity. You have a blind spot for the unraveling whole.”

Our senses are never inaccurate, just our interpretations.

I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope.