Lucía’s Reviews > Conversations with Friends > Status Update

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.

If two people make each other happy then it’s working.

I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say. She was a great listener, an active listener.

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.

I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.

You think everyone you like is special

I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate.

Nick’s sympathy seemed unconditional, like he rooted for me regardless of how I acted, whereas Bobbi had strong principles that she applied to everyone, me included. I didn’t fear Nick’s bad judgement like I did Bobbi’s. He was happy to listen to me even when my thoughts were inconclusive, even when I told stories about my own behaviour that showed me in an unflattering light.

I didn’t like cornering him into having serious conversations.