Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

we are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us.

One thing that is interesting is that lots of poisons taste sweet. They’re not like acid. They’re like syrup.

But who begat you is a question with an answer only someone else can tell you. You’re born, and when you’re old enough to understand, they tell you whose child you are. You get claimed. That’s when you’re born again into something—not the world, but the word, the family name. It’s the most important thing about you, whose you are.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.