welcome

She didn’t understand why the people around her acted like they were in movies. Was it because of the constant proximity to cameras that they didn’t want a single moment to be wasted, or a bad angle on record?  Each turn was a practiced, tongue-in-cheek pas de bourré. Each smile made that ding sound, tinny and false.  Maybe it was due to that law of quantum physics, where nothing that is observed can be the same as when it is unobserved (is that how it goes?).  And so the act of observing (by her) ruined any possibility of the natural, the unknowable truth. Perhaps.

She glanced up from her book at the couple laughingly touching each others faces on the tube, looking deeply at one another, then deeply at her, then deeply at each other. Performing their mating ritual. For her. For themselves. To fashion their own legends of the love they once had and lost, just like in Titanic.  Never let go, Jack. One thing that always bothered her about that scene was that there was clearly enough space for both of them on that door that she was floating on.  They both could have been saved. Maybe Leo wanted to die in his prime, be remembered while he still had the baby face.  Maybe Rose lied about what happened. The fact is that the whole thing is a lie, but it still gets absorbed and integrated into our semantic maps.  Thus the cognitive web that is activated following a certain gooshy feeling somewhere around the solar plexus contains both one’s own past gooshy feelings, as well as others that were prompted by media consumption. But that’s nothing new.

In the margin of her book she wrote, “I’ve never had an original thought”.

She looked to the left. She scribbled, “On the other hand, I’ve always had Original Sin. So.”

To her left there was a large, hairy man who was very asleep.  He had woken himself up with a loud snort a few stations back, but seemed to have settled back since that incident.  Even the way people slept was like in the movies. That cartoon snort.  Life imitating art or the other way around? She would like to see this man in a movie. He would be very good at playing a fearsome giant, who is tough on the outside but really just wants to be loved like everyone else. If she wrote the movie she would call him Justin the Giant.  She wrote this in the margin. She doodled a picture, but she wasn’t very good at that and it made her feel sad so she quickly finished the page she was reading so she could turn it and forget she had drawn something so amateurish, so unlike the man she saw before her. As a child she had feared her own mistakes, and refused to acknowledge her fallibility.  Remembering moments when she had lost face could still redden her cheeks and fill her with shame and self-loathing. She had recently read an article about smart little girls, about how they are taught that they do well at things because they are talented, and so when they can’t do something right away they tend to stop trying. This explained her whole life. Reading the article had given rise to a creepy feeling that she tried to avoid as much as possible – the feeling that she was a type. That there were many other people in the world that were just like her. The biggest load of crap that gets shovelled into every kid’s mouth is that they are special. And it’s probably the only thing that sticks, because it’s an innate property of the human mind. 

The mind, the brain. It had become her new little obsession. She got it. She liked the gyri, the sulci. She liked giving directions in latin and greek – it’s slightly rostral to the dorsolateral aspect of the - yes, yes, there, precisely.  She liked the macabre stories that came with each piece of information gleaned about brain function prior to the 1960s – the gunshot wounds, the railroad spikes through the head, the rare diseases, the lobotomies.  Patient histories became her new bedside stories; Oliver Sacks her new hero. In a fit of self-expression one night she drew a disappointing sketch of a brain on her bedroom wall in permanent marker.  She had regretted it almost immediately.

bahahaha

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