Everything's Fine

by Cecilia Rabess

Why did her success have to be predicated on perfection instead of, say, a vague sense that she was someone people would like to have a beer with?

responsible for the final print and bind, she is not the one who fucked up. It was late and everything was finalized. Jess had been moving semicolons around the page for more than an hour and finally everything had been approved. Then Charles had sent her two more pages.

How easy it is for him to compartmentalize. To divide the world into easy binaries: real and not real, important and trivial. Affects me and doesn’t affect me. If he can’t see it then it’s not real, the empiricist in him. Jess stares at the ceiling and wonders what he sees when he sees her. How much of her he sees. Wonders if, to him, she’s fully real. Wonders whether the aperture of his mind is wide enough to accommodate her in her entirety.

But it’s not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and

“Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, Jess!” Josh is finally angry. “What do you expect? Every single Republican is not racist, Jess. Voting the party line is not a fucking crime. It doesn’t make you racist.” “Yes, it does! Just because no one’s literally claiming the mantle of racism—although honestly the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if they started wearing T-shirts that said I heart racism—just because no one’s beating their chest and shouting ‘I’m a racist’ doesn’t mean they’re not racist!

Jess, but at this point is it even ethical to be dating him?”

Her father has the wrong impression. He thinks that everything she does is good and nice. But he doesn’t fully know her, knows only the outline of her life.