2025-05-07
She was sad. She did not want to be in this room with these people. How they talk. "Have you heard about my annoyances and achievements?" they would say to her, and she would turn and look at them and zoom in on their eyes and say, "Have you heard about mine?" And they would shriek, "Are you kidding me? You would ask me that? You, of all people, would ask me that?" They would thump the table and snort and smash their glasses on the table, like horses. The tablecloth would turn orange and purple and lumpish with the vodka sauce and wine and brains. Then they would laugh and she would laugh. The laughing would be used later as proof that it was funny, that everyone was having fun, that it wasn't really about what it had been about, at the time. That it was a memory, that they had been making memories. She would stand up and walk over to the dance floor, looking at people. She would start dancing. Clicking around the dance floor like a beetle. Tippity-tap. The hungry elderly sitting at the periphery, demanding that the young dance. The elderly, rising, moving to the dance floor, saying, "I am going to dance, too. I will dance. Let me dance one more time." The ceiling on her shoulders as she danced (she was very tall, she was holding up the ceiling for the entire party, no one thanked her). The concrete groaning against her back, saying, "Oh, how I wish I were a child again. Oh, to be once more such a little dweller in the mountain, such a little granule of limestone, running down the mountainside." Then someone in particular brought her back from these imaginings. He looked her in the eyes and said, "Do you want to dance together?" It was revolting. Maybe there was something wrong with him. She said, "No, thanks, I'm just going to stay with my friends," and pointed at her friends. He said, "Definitely! All good." His turning away, his pocketing himself, his slumping back into the room, a rickety skeleton, stooped by loneliness, six long limbs straining in lumpish revolt.
2025-06-20
People come to you asking how to behave under certain conditions. You want to show them that they actually know how to behave under those conditions, and insofar as they don't, it doesn't really matter how they behave, and insofar as they believe it does matter when it doesn't, this misunderstanding is merely a misunderstanding of what matters, which misunderstanding they can fix without assistance from any teacher, not only because a teacher was probably in part responsible for it, but also because this kind of misunderstanding is not born of an intellectual mistake but a mistake of, say, the heart. How do you show them all that without letting them believe that you have taught them anything? For if they believe you have taught them something, they will believe that the people who have not learned that teaching do not understand it. But the teaching was always only ever that they already understand but their hearts are hardened.
