To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.

leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one.

He found himself aware that he was having an adventure, and then ashamed at his pride, for, in truth, being a visitor demanded no kind of bravery at all.

They both, Edward and Charles, wanted companions, but Charles’s companion would be a fellow in complacency, in regularity, whereas Edward’s would be a fellow in adventure, someone bold and brave. One offered a vision of who he was, the other of who he hoped to become.

It was a relief to be with someone so declarative; it was a relief not to think.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

And then I’ll start walking—not to my mother’s house, not to Lipo-wao-nahele, but to somewhere else, the same place I hope you’ve gone, and I won’t stop, I won’t need to rest, not until I make it there, all the way to you, all the way to paradise.

He saw my life as an indictment of his simply because it was different.

Who would want a child to grow up in this time, in this place? It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult. So why would you? What kind of respect for life is that?

Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable.