Fleishman Is In Trouble took me out of my reading slump and I couldn't be more grateful to it. I found it on the curb the other miscellaneous contents of someone's life, someone who, at least according to the note, was moving out. I found a postcard tucked in the book and then found the people who were corresponding (it's a small neighbourhood!) This was in August. I read 250+ pages of Fleishman over three days as I procrastinated my applications (all submitted now), my assignments (I need to write 2000+ words in a day), and my commitments (the many unanswered texts waiting for me, the explanations and apologies that I owe to loved ones). Perhaps it's because of the December blues, perhaps it's because I've been furtively texting someone I shouldn't, perhaps it's because of the moodiness, but Fleishman felt like a revelation, like someone was holding a mirror up to me. I've been an ass. I've been made an ass of but, more importantly, I've been an ass, and growing up is accepting that we see what we see, that we aren't represented by the fiction we tell ourselves--tales of our goodness and our worth and our correctness. That I experience anger, that I can be angry and avoidant, that a nasty voice lives in my head. That what I want the most right now is to be with her, to take a long, never-ending walk with some breaks to eat pie in the park, to paint, to listen to the acapella group, to buy a massive onion, to hang out at the metro station for 30 minutes just to delay our goodbyes, to go to the AMC, to the waterfront, to wait an hour on the weekends for her bus, to play the piano together, to talk, talk, talk, talk for the rest of our lives. I have never wanted to walk with someone so badly, so desperately until I met her and we walked everywhere. She's unfamiliar in the best ways. I haven't made silly voices since she left. She saw me. I offered her the best parts, the good parts, and let her see some of the bad ones too. I wanted her to have it all. I've been afraid--and Fleishman spoke to the same fear--that I can't do this for the rest of my life. That I've spun some fiction about myself (for my own self) about how I can and want to spend a lifetime seeing, wanting, accepting, and trusting to be seen, wanted, accepted. That I can take her for who she is, as she is, even when I'm not watching or being watched. She is one of the first people I want to text when something happens, when nothing happens. I want to hold her hand, hug her, laugh with her, trade soups, and love her. Like one of my friends says, life is sad and weird. I want to ring her up and spend the next two hours catching up on all the time that we've lost. She recently said that if we had more time, we would've had an excellent year together. She's right. But then reality catches up and I've to face where I've been Rachel and where I've been Toby. I haven't even watched the film but the trailer of Knight of Cups left quite the impression on my teenage mind back when I had guilt and was convinced that I would be found out and that I needed some kind of redemption to make me whole. I'm Toby, I'm Rachel, I'm Christian Bale by the ocean.
