Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Time became a constant itch.

Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind.

The portion of her unaffected by grief could see that it would be natural to mourn the loss of a parent and almost thought her tears were the result of an innate reflex that did not, in actual fact, involve her emotions.

He wove intricate conjectures around her, threaded with contrived causal links that quickly expanded into vast nets of suppositions, which he would unspin and weave again in different patterns.

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.

she found herself back in the quiet inner hideaway that had sheltered her in her childhood and early youth, and drew comfort from her old solitary habits, her books, her journal, her walks. In the past, she had thought this space within herself to be as vast and serenely inexplicable as a cosmos. Now she deemed it narrow and flat.

Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

Helen seemed calmer in German. Although she spoke it with remarkable ease, she also had vast lacunae, as is usually the case with those who have somewhat haphazardly taught themselves a language. Because she often had to pause and find circumlocutions to bypass grammatical voids and lexical gaps, she gave the impression of having slowed down, of having mastered, in some measure, her anxiety.

Only a fool would distinguish past from present in such a way. The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries, as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy.

For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality—of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.

Helen started to feel safe without having to surround herself with a moat of words. Her sentences still had a tendency to become torrents of wild associations, but they sprang from reasonable sources and often came to some sort of conclusion,

It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal.

Out. All the way to the edge of the woods. Nature is always less gaudy than I remember it. It has much better taste than I.

Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist’s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one. Others thrive on the belief that the only time each evanescent word will be read is as it’s being written. And others yet address the writer’s future self: one’s testament to be opened at one’s resurrection. They declare, respectively, “I was,” “I am,” “I’ll be.”

Silence between 2 is always shared. But 1 of the 2 owns it and shares it with the other.

The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from us.

My weakness allowed A to show, after such a long time, the feelings that bitterness + jealousy had been unable to extinguish. And it allowed me to see that the forgiveness I’d withheld from him had crystalized, in my clenched fist, into spiteful pride.

God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.

Sun stain on blanket. Each particle of light has travelled from the sun to my feet. How can something so small have made it so far? Up close, the stream of photons would look like a meteor shower. My feet play with it. The vertigo of scale (the space between a photon and me and a star) is a foretaste of death.

Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future. Like a retrograde or a palindrome.

“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was”

took me a while to realize the hum was only inside my head Is a waveless noise still a sound?

In and out of sleep. Like a needle coming out from under a black cloth and then vanishing again. Unthreaded.