Severance

by Ling Ma

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

A second chance doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

To despise someone is intimate by default.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?