What is at stake is who is permitted to repair. What hangs in the balance is the ability of the individual stores to command their own fate. What hangs in the balance is agency itself. Imagine two couples at a table. One woman has ordered a hamburger. The other a chicken sandwich and fries. The men are not living in the moment. Their food sits untouched in front of them. They do not even remember what it is. They are processing their anxieties, or more to the point being processed by them. Those anxieties revolve around the fact that the men, six years earlier, had been together. Their breakup had been terrible, intensified by the fact that neither of them was truthful about who he was. Fear had driven them inside themselves and then away from one another. Each told his parents that his roommate had moved out. Their lives resumed, rubbled by dissembling. They had met again when their girlfriends had befriended one another, two weeks before. This is the first meeting, highly informal, intended as light fun, and yet the two men are rendered mute by their shared past. Honesty is out of the question. One woman exhales and asks about dessert. Her boyfriend springs up in relief and gets to the counter. “The flurry machine is broken,” he is told. He does not know what to say in return. He says nothing. He goes back to the table, as mute as before. He hears his girlfriend laughing. “Carry me along like you done through the toy fair,” she says. The other woman laughs too. The other man says nothing, looks up helplessly. His food will never be touched.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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