Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.

Clearly she’s too young to read Tropic of Cancer, but she can’t accept this; if she knows what the words mean, the book’s meaning ought to unfold.

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.