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‘Visiting the past because you’re nostalgic is like drinking sea water when you’re dying of thirst. It’ll only make you thirstier. And it’s gross. Why would you do it in front of a complete stranger?’ she asked.
‘Don’t say things like that. You are all beautiful children.’ I thought: why does everyone on the planet earth have to be beautiful? What kind of value system is that?
It was Lisa who gave me the first clue that ‘spirituality’ could be a splashy form of self-obsession.
Why were so many people susceptible to God and I was not? And who even wants to be? I always hated how, even on his best days, He could be merciful but never actually kind.
We sat at that window for hours, watching the palm trees turn black against the darkening sky, beginning in earnest the conversation that would continue until the day I died.
I said I also believed that life was meaningless but not worthless, and how that distinction had been enough to get me out of bed in the morning. I believed that gullibility was akin to a disability and should be treated accordingly. And that if everything happens for a reason, those reasons are chance, luck and chaos.
Social media only seemed good to me if you no longer thought earth time was precious.
The world went mute, the heart in my chest no longer held in place. The yearning that had consumed us was gone, just like that, and replaced by some entirely new version of itself: a longing for the exact thing we had.
Not all who wander are lost, but most of us are.
My mood: unconditional surrender.
Stoic people exhaust me. I needed to see the slightest touch of hysteria in someone’s response to an emergency or I just assumed the person was a psychopath.
I hoped nationalism was dead. Of all the arbitrary distinctions made between people, the longitudinal and latitudinal happenstance of birth always seemed to rank among the most meaningless.
That night, I had a dream in which I was trying to turn towards a window but my head wouldn’t move. That was the whole stupid dream.
He said: ‘I was frightened of too many things, none of which killed me.’
‘Do you think we’re avoiding the secret fear that we’re all the same person?’ he asked.
‘So. Angus. What do you do for fun?’ the woman who was my mother asked. This was a question I’d never known how to answer in my entire life. ‘I guess I try to enjoy myself in a general sense and never designate a specific time and place for it.’
