The Nix

by Nathan Hill

“I don’t think he really wants to organize a festival,” Faye said. “I think he wants to know he’s not alone. He just seems lonely to me.”

“No. He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?”

“It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen.”

And the more she believes she only has one true self, the more she flees to find it. She’s like someone trapped in quicksand whose efforts to escape only make her drown faster. Will she ever understand this? Who knows.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

We’re not our skin of grime, he had written, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset…