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.

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?

Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings. Is this not the one thing, the one thing, he has tried to teach them?

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

“Don’t you want to know how you come off in it? Don’t you want to see how she depicts you?” Karen asked. “It’s not me. It’s fiction.”

She knows she’s not a special kind of victim, for having gotten shown the ropes by a much older man who, it turned out, did not care about her. She knows this is perfectly common; just look at all the stories/plays/movies about it.

Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other. Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self? You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can’t help but hurt. That’s a load of BS! Anyone tangled with me got that way by a choice of their own. If I shoot myself, they had fair warning. What warned them? The plain knowledge that I wasn’t them.