Julia’s Reviews > Assembly > Status Update

(A table of meanings white vs black)

Best case: those children grow up, assimilate, get jobs and pour money into a government that forever tells them they are not British. This is not home.

2/2 viscous, random chance. And then, compounding.

It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that this world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organised, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach - won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from god. Just 1/2

(Bf) He leans back against the desk, hugs his arms over his chest. Says: he wishes he could be like me. Take up a soulless City job, make a metric shit ton of money. But all this – he waves an obligatory arm at the musty shelves around him – it demands more of him. There is a legacy to uphold.

(Meeting bf’s parents) But the father still has questions. With excited and unwavering eye contact he asks my opinions on everything. Love island? Cambridge? Knife crime; the BRICS; China’s investment in Africa?
The questions sound less like questions than elaborately worded treatises

Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Don’t inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air.

After the war, the crumbling empire sent again for the colonial subjects. Not soldiers, this time, but nurses to carry a wavering NHS on their backs. …
(Later) new laws were drawn up; our rights revoked.
Yet, some survived. … And an ethic, a mindset, a drive was established then, that persists now. A relentless, uncompromising pursuit.

This endless complying, attaining, exceeding – why?

A man’s Blackberry slipping out of his hands on to the tracks (subway station). “A toddler before the tantrum”. “A hot stream of profanity”. “He peed over the platform edge. Leaning, looking, out onto the tracks. Contemplating climbing down? Fuck, he said again. Then ran both hands back through his hair and left the platform”