Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.

REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days.

Her mind startles her with the wish to be dead. To be dead, instead of in pain. Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that? Reference to the future, to its unbroken promise, is the reflex of those for whom the future’s mirage still exists. Such people are lucky, deceived.