Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings—if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That’s enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.

I suppose carers can all too easily become captors, and with the best intentions in the world, we’d become just that.

As I straightened up, a patch of the darkness behind me got darker. The sensation was similar to the one you get when someone’s staring at you, someone close by but out of your line of sight.

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘definitely’ not, because things always take some kind of crazy turn when you say ‘definitely.’ But I’m moderately sure I’m somebody else.”

You have a better time when you’re not expecting anything real. That’s why seriously tacky people manage to enjoy themselves wherever they are.”

Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We’d all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we’d like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that’s all snuffed out. In you go, in you go, creature who dwells in the stationery box, in you go, clutching your withered posy . . .

To Otto and Xavier—here’s to unseeing the world—Ava.

To journey that far on wings so painstakingly won, all those centuries of artistic dreams and scientific thought . . . only to arrive with bags and bags of waste. In the end, that’s what we produce the most of, isn’t it? And maybe it’s what we’re best at.”

I thought, but didn’t say, that there was something vaguely compulsive about the way that when we were together we thought and talked about anything and everything except the train we were on. But that was probably our issue, not the train’s.

“Sanity and consistency of perception are the same thing?” Xavier asked.

I never have anything up my sleeve except for the utterly fraudulent authority with which I assure you—yes, you—that you’ll get through this, whatever it is, and everything will be better. We both know nothing’s all right, but when I tell you it will be, you take it. If you don’t, it’s because you’re holding out for another outcome altogether.

“People often don’t realise what they know,” I said, quoting one of my favourite books, “and only when it is explicitly stated does it become obvious to them. Something like that?”

I trust you, Ava. When I show you what I’ve done, you greet it as whole. No concerning yourself with what’s absent, or parallels you wish to hear. You listen for what is already there. You were the first person I’d met who did that for my songs. This isn’t to say that I feel safe with you. Safety is something else.

My employer values specificity over certainty.

What if his longing outlasts him? What if this longing actually is him, and he was a living, breathing strategy for its fulfilment?

. I think we can see these outbursts as being linked to excessive enthusiasm. It’s easy to overdo things in the sincere pursuit of tranquility.

At some point you have to become as unavailable to your rejecter as they are to you.