Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

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

His mouth is nothing like hers because made for hers; her first time kissing him had been the first experience of her life that had exceeded expectation.

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?

When her classmates inform her God doesn’t exist, she beams at them without condescension. She loves them for sharing their thoughts! Just as Jesus loves them, and they don’t even need to believe it.

Sarah recalled, for the first time in years, that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.

she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same.

I’m dying to do your Tarot but I think you should sleep, just as soon as you swallow your supplements.

Lol role model, absolute icon

In the dozen years since, much has happened to Karen. Much of what has happened has been therapy, and the rest of what has happened tends to be described in terms drawn from therapy.

The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him.

is somehow undeserved, or unpleasant to him. Karen has never understood David’s relationship to his sexuality, which like his charisma seems to stalk the world independent of David’s intentions, doing whatever it wants.

Karen read these with absorption but felt no need to reach for the Post-its.

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.

the perspective of a nondrinking person seems to be unique, especially among people who read,

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one.

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

Karen’s mother had adored Masterpiece Theatre with the slavish adoration of somebody who thinks she’s cultured but in reality is turned on by the clothes.

My father and I—this is the story I tell myself; who knows how his story would go—are too much alike to be close. We’re both extremely competent, we both like to be left alone, we both had a weak spot for my mother and hate ourselves for it.

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.

The plane vibrates and roars as it flies, which alarms Karen because it seems like it’s working too hard.

We almost never know what we know until after we know it.

At “Heathrow,” once they’d stood in all the lines and had their passports stamped—that’s a thrill nothing has ever undone, Karen can feel it again to this day, the knowing she’d just made her life forever larger than her mother’s;

It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring.

Despite his obvious defects of character he’s persisted in her psyche as a weird joker-god, malicious and omniscient.

Karen came to understand that she’d been pampered so much at the home because the home was a farm for growing White Christian Babies Without Health Defects of the type that’s so rare and in such high demand on the adoption market now.

“You felt that you had to have one? Or you thought that you had to have one? Thoughts are often false. A feeling’s always real. Not true, just real.”

Claire had graduated high school only ten years ago but the building made her feel as though she’d graduated in a previous century that had thought a lot less of its children, or maybe had just thought a lot less of the way that it thought about children.

Writing fiction is like dreaming; the recognizable and the unthinkable, the mundane and the monstrous, coalesce in the least predictable ways, in the end turning into something entirely unlike real life, and yet hopefully relevant in some way to our shared human life.