Foe

by Iain Reid

Everything changes. Change is one of the only certainties in life. Human beings progress. We have to. We evolve. We move. We expand. What seems far-fetched and extreme becomes normal and then outdated pretty quickly. We move on to the next thing, the next development, the next frontier.

Maybe the orbit we inhabit is preordained. I’m okay with it even if I don’t really believe in that kind of thing. You can hold beliefs and not always believe in them.

I’m not an observant person. I see what I see, and the rest doesn’t matter. What’s the point? Why bother taking notice of everything going on around you, filling up your mind with irrelevant details and excess information? What’s going to happen will happen regardless. Awareness is beside the point.

Anybody can remember details if you ask them to, I say, but it doesn’t mean it actually happened that way.

It’s a job. A job I’m good at. I need a job, so I work there. It’s not like it’s some ideal fantasy.

Beauty isn’t fleeting. Beauty is eternal.

It makes me think of Baudelaire: ‘I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.’ ”

“No. They stay together because it’s expected, because it’s what they know. They try to make it work, to endure it, and end up living under some kind of spiritual anesthetic. They go on, but they are numb. And the more I think about, the more I think there’s nothing worse than to live your life this way. Detached, but abiding. It’s immoral.”