The Details

by Ia Genberg

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called “self”: traces of the people we rub up against.

Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation—or the “so-called conversation” as Niki would put it—sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.

TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

Trust, after all, is only a word when you can’t feel it in your body. As soon as trust attaches, as soon as it takes root, it fuses with the rest of what’s there, takes on other names.

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.

Articles about anxiety often note that it was historically useful, so evolution made it part of our nature. Anxiety motivated us to make sure the fire was out and the children still breathing; it protected us in teaching us to protect ourselves and others. It’s a simple sorting mechanism: the Stone Age people who anxiously scanned the forest for predators survived, while anyone who wandered carelessly in between the trees was eaten.

Her anxiety kept her living at surface level, and it might be fair to say that she was banal in that sense, helplessly, against her own will. Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.