Tru[d]th, Not Shells

scootering + sand playing w/ halmoni harabuji on friday, haircuts + playpie on saturday, church crafts + super mario (first time at a theater!) on sunday. puzzle and random paper crafts. what a wild and fun summer weekend for w and us. hide n seek and chasing at parks in between.

fact is, having homemade hot chocolate with mini marshmallows on top + freshcut strawberries with coconut whipped cream, a few nights in a row = noticeably improved feelings re: quality of life

Wow, and that post was even before we got the call about the house!

The father in him, the B, would not countenance tears. On second thought, they wouldn’t come anyway, as if his ducts had been cauterized. He had never known what to do with the affections of others. When his mother would squeeze him as a child, her way of showing love, he would squeal “Mama, stop!” in delight, but his voice had long lost that register. “Dorogoi,” M said (“My dear”), “do it for yourself, if not for me and N. Save yourself from this endless heartache. It’s okay to give up on a dream. The majority of dreams don’t come true. Our whole country is learning as much.” —

"I know how much you love this place,” M said, “but it’s only a placeholder for your memories. For a time when this was the only spot on earth where you had friends and were welcome and loved, and everyone spoke your language. Well, you have friends now, and you speak the language, and you don’t have to pine for me anymore, you can have me every day and every night.”

As a child he had lived in fear of being scolded and maybe he feared it still. For thirty-one-year-old E, nothing had been worse than being told he was wrong. That’s what F had taught him, how hurtful it was to try something and still remain inconsequential. But as he told his story to D, he managed to see just how funny all of it was. How steeped the world was in artistic failure, even as the artists (and sometimes the society around them) failed to recognize that failure as such. Gradually he began to do what S always did when he spun a tale—he began to make fun of all the principals, chiefly himself. As soon as one acquired a liberal education, huge parts of life became an elaborate joke. Maybe that’s what you paid for when your parents’ check cleared with the bursar—the rights to the joke. 

He nodded thoughtfully, picked at his larb with mass-produced chopsticks, knowing he could no longer eat any more of it, delicious as it was. Even though the tables were far apart, his senses were now heightened enough that he could hear every conversation around them (mostly they were about local real estate), and his poor bladder was now consumed by that sweet, lovely panic that accompanies reciprocated love.

He wished he could fall in love with someone as his wife evidently had done. He had chased after beauty for such a long part of his life, until he had caught up with it and found it, like everything else, worthy of no more than a chapter or two of heightened prose.