Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

Friendless, even in this hothouse of oft-elicited, eagerly yielded intimacies.

REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon.

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?

This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.

Heartbreak doesn’t flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.

Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that?

Playing the lead in the dramatic mainstage doesn’t even rate as highly as playing a secondary character in the musical. None of them, not even those who arrived at the school with an actual hatred of musicals, question this valuation.

She’s never understood, certainly because she’s never seen a live opera but also because she’s never heard a half-decent performance, not even in part, on TV, that opera, in fact, is the highest redemption of longing.

Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings.

And Sarah recalled, for the first time in years, that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.

Love was some kind of chemical error.

She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare.

And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

Often the experience of our simplest perceptions, for example the feeling of blindness that comes from walking into a very bright space after standing for an hour in the dark, leads to an inaccurate thought—I’ve made a mistake—which leads to a feeling—anxiety—which reinforces the thought.

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one.

Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” It comes from the Greek nostos: to return home, and the Greek algos: pain.

Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.

Writing fiction is like dreaming; the recognizable and the unthinkable, the mundane and the monstrous, coalesce in the least predictable ways, in the end turning into something entirely unlike real life, and yet hopefully relevant in some way to our shared human life.