He knew his friends well enough to know where their shoes pinched them, as the saying went. But he had no friends. Or rather, he had known his friends this well when he had had them, and he had had many, and one by one they had sensed that he knew them this well, and his knowledge had felt too close, a pressure upon them from all sides, and they had drifted, at first in a manner that seemed accidental, but as they had drifted further they had managed the courage to admit that the drift was intentional, and they had accelerated the drift, and after a while none of them were near him any longer, and they had new friends who didn’t know where their shoes pinched them, or anything else, and whatever intelligence he still held about them, though considerable, was worthless. All of this flashed through his mind as he stood outside a coffee shop listening to a woman he didn’t know sing a song he didn’t know, trying to figure out if it was a live performance or a recorded one. It occurred to him in time that it made no difference anymore, and he went home hoping that he would feel something later in the evening, even if what he felt was pain.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment