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Time passed, and then suddenly the old man spoke. “A circle with many centers.”
Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless.
“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,”
Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely), people age in the blink of an eye. Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock.
I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?
But there was something else, something far bigger. And, in an instant, that tableau was etched in my heart—a kind of spiritual landscape that could be found only there, at a set age, in a set place, and at a set moment in time.
When I was in school, and in the years after that, I never once had girls flocking around me. That’s one of the few things I can say with certainty in this uncertain life.
I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.
For a moment, my girlfriend’s brother was silent, studying me closely to see whether I understood. It was as if he were outside a house staring in through a window.
Once again, I was confused. It felt like bits of reality and unreality were randomly changing places.
I’ve never liked giving up on a book once I’ve started it. I always hold out hope that there will be some riveting development toward the end, though the chances of that are pretty slim.
If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still—who is that in the mirror?
