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The brain knows no tenses. If it has longed for something, it has already had it. The leap comes when we do not want to lose the future we have already known.
Hugo never followed up anything Ester said. Ester always followed up what Hugo said. Neither of them was really interested in her but they were both interested in him.
It was one way to spend a life. You could get a lot done while you waited for life to begin.
It’s not worth it, she felt. It’s always worth it, she thought. Worth it or not, I can’t give it up, she thought and felt.
Why could she not grasp that the abysmal anguish of an unanswered text was the same every time and the only way to avoid it was not to send any?
In her heated state, Ester was unable to see that utterances could be as light as ash and just as burnt-out. They were scattered lazily, fell, came drifting down. Words were not enduring monuments to intentions and truths. They were sounds to fill silences with.
She could hear all she needed to hear to understand definitively that she had to walk away and not spare this man another thought. But the knowledge did not penetrate as far as her autonomous system of insight. It stopped at a more superficial level where excuses feed on whatever they can get hold of.
Ester would not allow him to discharge his debt by playing down the pain his actions and lack of replies had caused her. She resisted hard when the reflex action of making things easy for him tried to kick in. Having not offered him the relief he sought, she fully expected some kind of accusation or spiteful comment to follow. And it did.
People lie to be free. People lie because they will not be left in peace if they tell it the way it is. People lie because other people assume the right to confront them in the name of truth.
Rather than forfeit the love and admiration that kept her faithfully placid, thus setting them both free, he tossed her yet another juicy bone — and consigned her once again to the mincer.
The talk is nothing to do with gaining clarity, as the talker claims, and everything to do with convincing and inducing.
One betrays and is betrayed and there’s nothing to talk about because there are no obligations when the will is not to hand. What is done out of compassion is worth little if the other party hopes it is done out of love.
In a week’s time she would have endured a year of suffering. It would intensify and become more concentrated for a few days now, but it was purer and less unclear. There was nothing left to understand.
