I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

I’d forgotten about the light at Granby. It was different there, older, passing through centuries before it reached you.

We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.

“Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

The image I kept returning to was of a tangled necklace chain. In one of the more normal moments of my later childhood, my mother taught me to rub a chain with olive oil, then take a long, straight pin and start working on the tiniest of gaps, the place with the most give. Once one thing loosened, another could loosen, another. I always felt claustrophobic at the start. But over time I’d learned patience, learned the reward of breathing through my discomfort. What I knew was that we’d found a gap in the knot. I didn’t know what else it would loosen up, and I didn’t want to pull too hard, but I knew if we finessed it, wiggled it gently, other things would follow.

Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.

I had to accept that people fundamentally slide past each other in this world.