We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

When Officer Haddick took off his hat, his hair was receding from his forehead in a clean, round curve that left his features nicely uncluttered, like a happy face.

If your brother loves you, I say it counts for something.

What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

When your room’s pink, you don’t sleep a wink. When your room’s blue, you sleep the night through, he told me when I protested, apparently under the misapprehension that I could be silenced with rhyme.

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen I was a true believer.

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?