Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

“It’s the right thing to do.” Clay knew this would work; his wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing, necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity, in the end.

Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.

true intelligence was accepting how limited one’s intelligence always is.

You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.

Nothing matters to children but themselves, or perhaps that is the human condition.

You told yourself you’d be attuned to a holocaust unfolding a world away, but you weren’t. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.

Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself.