Have You Seen Luis Velez?

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“Children always feel they are the ones at fault,” she said. “They think they are defective somehow, if everything is not just as it should be.

People laugh at things they don’t understand. It makes them feel safe. But it’s a false feeling. They are no safer. They just feel as if they are. The world is full of people too foolish to judge the difference.”

“Never be afraid to look, Raymond. It’s always better to look. Whatever you’re afraid of, turn toward it, not away. Once you’re willing to do that, it loses all its power over you.

Life gives us nothing outright. It only lends. Nothing is ours to keep. Absolutely nothing. Not even our bodies, our brains. This ‘self’ that we think we know so well, that we think of as us. It is only on loan. If a person comes into our life, they will go again. In a parting of ways, or because everyone dies. They will die or you will die. Nothing we receive in this life are we allowed to keep.

She is a believer in the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality.”

She seems to think there’s just one objective reality, and good people will all see it if they’re willing to.”

We both know a strange truth about the world: that people judge you by your most controversial half.

What can you do with a world where people do not even see?”

And the thing about quantum superpositioning? How one thing can be in more than one place at the same time but still have the same reaction to some kind of stimulus even if the two things are miles apart, because it’s not two things, it’s one thing in two places? If I try to think about that too hard, it feels like it wants to break my brain.”

Here the world is full of all these men trying to model what it means to be a man, but they don’t truly know. They think it means be tough, feel nothing, betray nothing. And then Luis comes along and decides that his definition of a man is someone who is not afraid to be kind. That takes courage. Don’t you think?”

The thing about a family is the love. The ‘what kind?’ and ‘how will it work?’ is nothing. That’s just a thing you worry about before you learn that those details aren’t what matter at all.”

“After all, the only thing that hurts more than tears shed is tears unshed.”

“I believe in something,” she said. “Something that I certainly hope knows better than me how the world should be arranged.”

The world is a tough place, my friend. I’m not ready to change my mind about that. And yet we’re called upon to be grateful that we’re in it. That seems to be our challenge.”