Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

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

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.

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?

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?

We’ve all had this dream, Sarah thinks. The dream in which, to the world’s surprise and our own, we turn out to be best.

Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is:

And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.

We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories

Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.