Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

Love is cooking together. It’s creating together.

“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said, to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”

Not that she was ever calm, but if she were to be calm, it would look like this.

There her fear was, right where she always left it, deep in her throat.

She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet.

She had sat at home and allowed the grief to weigh on her, a physical pressing on her chest that strained the muscles if she tried to get up or even turn her head. If she had had someone else to look after, a child, an elderly relative, even a pet, then maybe she would have forced herself into something resembling the person she had been before. But even then, inside she would be a vessel of fluids and mourning. She wasn’t the person she had been before and she never would be again.

Each death leads to smaller, invisible deaths inside the hearts of those left behind.

“Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?”

Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it.

They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women.

How many families with a quiet space where once a life had been lived among them?

In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts.

All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck.

This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle from the likes of her, five foot three, a gash down her chest, and a constant fear that she wouldn’t recognize a heart attack if it came because it would feel like her panic attacks.

A person lives always in the remnants of the life they’ve led up until the present, making do with whatever they’ve left behind for themself.

And while she grappled always with anxiety, and certainly having this old white man laughing at her from the passenger seat was not helping her anxiety one bit, she also contained a great capacity for stubbornness.

A life does not need to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not need to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. Ultimately, a life merely needs to be lived until there is no more living left to do.

At what point of pretending to do a job do you end up just doing the job?

It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid. The only way to be brave is to first be afraid.

There’s no moral to this story, but there is a real human life.

“I am an oracle. In hidden places on the highways, in the bathrooms at gas stations, behind the painted scenery of roadside attractions, in vans parked far out in the grassland. There are oracles on these roads.”

Happiness is not negated by subsequent pain. But it does make the possibility for future happiness seem dimmer. Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment’s longevity.

New York wine is so-so at best. But as the climate changes, who knows? Certainly the areas famous for wine will lose their climate, and so one of these places that are a laughingstock among wine snobs will become the new Bordeaux. Either that, or everyone will be too busy being refugees from the drowned cities to worry about wine.

There is a powerful force of good somewhere. Before I can find the evil that destroyed my life, I need to find the good that saved it.”

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because on one side was everything she had ever known and on the other side was a future, maybe, and even though she was afraid to leave everything she had ever known, she also wanted a future, maybe, and so hesitating, and then not, and then moving quickly, running, sprinting, even, desperate, she crossed, and found a future, maybe, leaving behind everything she had ever known.

It’s up to nature to tell people that they’re moving.

For the world to move forward, the good people must struggle to organize a better world. Praxis is merely a focus for that.

Remember this: No one sees the future. They only ever maintain it.”

“Everything about the human language is tied into time. It is a language by and for people experiencing time in linear order, each moment separated from the one before. When time is experienced all at once, it becomes difficult to express oneself the way that one might like.”

If a point of view becomes one’s entire identity, what was monstrous on the inside can become monstrous on the outside.”

Hank Thompson wasn’t taught to hate. He came to it naturally. As a teenager, most of his classmates looked like him, and this seemed right to him. At the time, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why it felt right, although later in life he would develop his own logic to explain it, one based on a patchwork of bad science and bad theology. He only knew that the few classmates who weren’t like him made him furious. He did everything he could to make their lives miserable. Others in his class weren’t as directly cruel, although they tolerated what he did, and this was its own cruelty.

“Never anything healthy about suspicion,” said Tanya. “But it sometimes will keep you alive.”

“I need you to hear all of this, not just the parts that you want to hear. I’m forgiving you. But I’m not doing it for you. I don’t know if you deserve forgiveness, and maybe I don’t care. Maybe there isn’t some great balance sheet of forgiveness where the equation of guilt can be figured until it’s all equal on both sides. Maybe it’s just what the person who was hurt feels, right or wrong. And if so, then I don’t want to think about what you deserve. I want to think about what I deserve.”

A person is not a problem with a solution. A person is their relationship to the world.

A life does not have to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not have to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. But sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a life with all that anyway.