The Details

by Ia Genberg

In Palle’s view she was unhinged in almost every conceivable way, but he couldn’t give a more specific definition of that word, “unhinged.” She was just “fucking unhinged,” a description which in the early nineties could pass as a diagnosis as good as any, just like “fucking annoying” and “fucking weird” and “just rude.”

Instead it was the emptiness where a characteristic should have been, if trust is a characteristic, since things started to get shaky for Sally the moment she was about to get attached to anyone. “Getting stuck,” she called it, while I called it “getting attached,” the distance between these two concepts a cornerstone of our conversations, her fear of “getting stuck” and my tendency to “get attached.”

I can’t quite view her political engagement as authentic, perhaps because I’ve never heard her provide an analysis any deeper than “it was a really dumb war” (about Vietnam), “why should they get to decide everything?” (about US imperialism), and “cars smell bad” (the environment).