I wrote this last week on a swaying evening train.
I get the train a lot. Learning to drive is on my list, but so are many things. If someone out there exists who accomplishes her dreams, wishes, tax certs, and ambitions by chronologically ticking shit off, I do not want to meet her. This always happens: a friend knows someone else and they keep telling you that you will love this stranger. They are casting a spell of destiny, little do they know your mental teeth grind out curse pheromones.
(There is a fish called the hagfish, and some websites call him the most disgusting creature on earth. When in trouble the hagfish releases a runny slime from his glands. When this slime meets the seawater outside the hagfish’s body, it becomes this sticky and clear substance. “According to common hagfish mythology, they can fill a 5-gallon bucket with the stuff in mere minutes.” You can find sticky videos of humans harassing hagfish in clear buckets and cases online.)
Finally your friend makes the platonic soulmates introduction at a party - I dunno, maybe you get invited to those - but you decide no, this mirror person will not do. Maybe they’re prettier, smarter, funnier, nicer - your potential made from clay and touched by a god. Maybe you notice your love interest enjoys talking with them. Maybe this person seems satisfied with life and wants the best for everyone. Your conversation becomes a game, a toothpick throwing contest. You might even go so far as to not suggest meeting for coffee sometime. When their name is brought up again by the hopeful friend, you go silent and pick up your phone. In another decade you might have picked up a magazine and slicked a page forward with a lick of your index. In books, people are plotted to death by licking and propelling poisonous pages.
On the train this evening there is a couple sitting opposite me. She looks like the girl in Game of Thrones who wants to kill everyone who killed her family and he looks a decade older than her.
Behind me there is a mother and her young son sitting diagonally across from each other. She was originally in a different seat quartet. This is a danger with automatic seat selection. Why would a computer assume two tickets purchased in the same transaction have any relation to each other? AI seems very A to me. I swapped seats with her because the man in the seat beside the child wouldn’t move. A young boy was stressing out beside him, and this man decided there was nothing he could do. He was asked to help someone and decided fuck it.
P.S. This is a great interview with one of my favourite writers, Catherine Lacey. She’s really good. The communal living situation she describes sounds like my idea of discomfort. Her novel The Answers (af link there) is such a great novel about female pain, wellness and entitled men. I can't really describe it other than I finished it with my body in a humming state.
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