The Discomfort of Evening

by Lucas Rijneveld

It’s confusing, but grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place. When there are too many of them, they pile up and everything gets stuck. Game over.

Mum doesn’t like made-up things, because stories in your imagination often leave out suffering and Mum thinks it should be part of things. She can never take a day off from thinking that because she’d feel guilty; she believes that everyone should bear their sins like lines for punishment in an exercise book.

She has the kind of beauty you rarely see, like the drawings she does with crayons: they’re lopsided and crooked and that’s what gives them their beauty, their naturalness.

We’re not being looked at, only observed, which is something quite different.

Even though it will feel uncomfortable for a while, but according to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.’

chips unite people more than any other type of food.

Multiple-choice questions often have traps, according to my teacher, because they all contain part of the reality and at the same time are lies.

Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother. We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are – vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.