Notes
The name of the planet Adina is from does not have an English equivalent. Roughly, it sounds like a cricket hopping onto a plate of rice.
When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth.
Adina can tell there are two contradictory impulses at work, fury and regret.
Pollution is human pressure weighing upon the earth,
Adulthood seems like a yearslong equation to beat traffic.
What is this heat in her throat, this urge to cry? It must be the opposite of homesickness, to return home to find it more beautiful, to return and still feel distance.
Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.
“You are the most unhappy person I’ve ever seen hold a bunch of balloons.”
similar to the vanilla sky line
When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel every edge. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.
Adina likes that she can see the results of waitressing. If the counter that runs like a spine throughout the four large dining rooms is grimy with the last shift’s crusted ends, she runs a damp washcloth over it until it shines. This is a welcome change from her studies and anxieties that spiral endlessly into the sky.
When you’re little, she faxes, sadness is a kid you can kick out of your game. A simple, fast-food feeling that leaves as soon as the bully is gone. Deeper sadnesses get buried into one’s coastal shelf, accessible only by your adult version.
As long as there are budgets and finite human life spans, human opportunity is a pie. This is unlike a father or friend pie because you cannot control it and there are only a certain number of slices. Humans who insist opportunity is not a pie have usually enjoyed the majority of slices.
Adina likes the moment before getting dropped off. The reserved people she grew up with only seemed comfortable sharing after they pulled to a halt and before she got out.
If when I explain human behavior you insist on logic, we won’t get far.
When humans enjoy themselves they no longer feel the passage of time.
Planes, subways, carts. Every few minutes her apartment shudders from whatever mode of transport hustles by. These sounds don’t bother her because they are not dainty eating noises and because they are signals of movement that make her feel successful. She has become a sort of hub.
A nonworking fireplace takes up so much space in the larger part of the L that it seems conspicuously unlit, like a friend who’s not speaking to her.
Occasionally, she pauses in the Landry Business Solutions waiting room, halted by the memory of a subject she’d detailed with meticulous patience but no longer cares about. Was there ever a time when she thought retail stores had sales because they loved their customers? When she thought it was impossible to be unhappy while holding balloons? Blue bettas, red glasses, the moon. Her past passions sound tinny when clinking against the jar of time.
The ego of the human male is by far the most dangerous aspect of human society. THIS HAS BEEN WELL-DOCUMENTED.
Everyone reminds her of someone she knew. Was the world on a twenty-year loop or did the human mind only have the capacity to make a finite amount of correspondences?
“A few years in New York, she starts saying ‘I love you.’” “Almost five,” Adina says. “Almost five,” her mother says. “At what point does one become a New Yorker?” “Never.”
People with money list what they did without. Poor people list what they had.
Walking home from the train, she passes a produce market. The heads of cauliflower admire her. She admires them. The chives are cheers.
“You’re so cute,” Sarah Glide says. “Everything you say is so weird!” Adina has learned the human tendency to pronounce mean words cheerfully.
We’re so tender, Adina thinks, our puny bodies cannot withstand any of this, how do we get through even one day?
Dogs, she faxes, are the best we can do.
Living in New York, she writes, is like sitting at a nine-million-person blackjack table. We work together against the dealer. If you call on 11 (request a fresh bagel to be toasted), the table scowls at you. You can trust the group. If a group of New Yorkers are walking against the light, you can cross. If a group of New Yorkers avoid a subway car, it is covered in feces. If a group of New Yorkers leave their cars parked on ASP day, alternate side of the street and parking meter rules have been suspended. Like it or not, you’re part of the team. Uptown or down? Express or local? Yell Hold the train, and at least three New Yorkers will wrench their hands between the closing doors. Life in New York is a series of no-look passes.
Every human dies. But the bad news is that every day they act like they don’t know they’re alive. They lie or behave inconsiderately or cheat. Each one is a little death. Humans experience many little deaths before the final one.
“It’s amazing to know,” he says. “That you’re never going to be totally okay ever again.”
Human life is quick. I do not mean: Life is short. I mean: The reason we feel like certain significant days happened only yesterday is because they did. Many of us have bodies that age preposterously out of proportion with how young we are. It’s like aging in theater time. We’re all seven-year-olds hired to play the parts of adults. A decade is not long. Two decades is not long. We say it is because we weigh it against the end of our life span. Our life spans are short and do not give us time to feel temporally in proportion.
One day the tears, perhaps sensing their pointlessness, halt.
Anyone questioning whether god exists need only consider the brevity of a dog’s life span. If there was a god, let alone a benevolent one, dogs would have life spans similar to parrots. We’d have to provide arrangements for them in our wills. We wouldn’t have to see their muzzles fill with gray at age four. We’d never have to find them in the morning, turned to stone.
One of the most underwhelming human American expressions of support is: Congrats. Its brevity cancels its sentiment. If someone truly cared about their friend’s achievement, they would finish the word. Instead, congrats: You are not worth ulation.
Alone. To be told she is not alone denies what she knows. Alone is not the bad news. Alone is reliable. Alone has been loyal to her like a boyfriend. The bad news is platitudes! Having the basest understanding of your situation questioned at a vulnerable time! You are not alone is meant for the person saying it. It is the opposite of sympathy.
An anonymous neighbor has left a letter of complaint. The geese have been wearing their raincoats for too long. “‘It is no longer spring,’” the woman reads aloud. “‘This is not appropriate. We rely on you.’” She folds the letter, baffled. “Who relies on ceramic geese? Who writes a letter like this?” “Someone upset about other things.” She gestures to the geese, outfitted in clear plastic with red polka dots, holding matching umbrellas. “I ordered autumn outfits but they haven’t arrived.” “You have no responsibility to anonymous letter writers,” Adina says. “And yet.”
The woman smiles and walks away. In this moment, Adina is certain of two things: It was a pleasant exchange, and she is finished living in New York. The former’s unarguability has made the latter visible, the way a steady hand draws out a timid child.
have never lost my beginner’s eye for the city, never stopped looking at the skyline when the 7 emerges from the tunnel for the aboveground stops.
Adina sits on her bed, mug of tea braced between her knees. She imagines every human she’s ever known entering her room one by one. They pause by her bedside. She smiles, seeing their particular gestures and movements clearly—Dominic with a shy knock, okay to come in? Audrey, confident, striding. Even those she was not supposed to want to see again she welcomes. Her father, Miguel, Dakota. They visit and move on. Outside, wind swirls through Queens and rattles her finicky windowpanes. Adina sits cross-legged and welcomes each person. Did each one—wherever they were physically—know they had stopped in? She hopes they are in the middle of a good meal, repairing a car they like, tromping the woods, negotiating with the stubborn roots of a rhododendron. She touches them, thinks highly of them, apologizes, forgives them. Every human, singular and exact, is bound by pain and a finite life span. Every human shares the same hometown. Her cheeks warm as if she has attended a party where her dress had been a hit. The wind outside, the tea in her mug. “It’s enough.”
beautiful description of.a twitter reply
The human life span was perfectly designed to be brief but to at times feel endless. A set of years that pass in a minute, eternity in an afternoon. Yet in the same way competing weather fronts produce a climate that’s right for a tornado, brevity versus eternity (the push-pull that contains everything) is the condition for romantic love, sorrow, betrayal, joy. Countless meaningless profound transactions.
To reach the end of your life and wish you had time for a few other roads—what could be more human?