As I am standing with my back to the door and he settles down on my futon, gingerly, like he’s afraid the frame will not support his weight, I know that the dissonance is finally dawning on him in a serious way. And while I never enter a room without wondering what personal adjustments need to be made, it is strange to see something similar happen to this friendly, white, midwestern man. It is strange to see him noticing about himself what I always notice—the optimism, the presumption, this rarefied alternate reality in which there is nowhere he does not belong. He looks around with this
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