Esme was the first person I knew who acted bored to elevate herself. Before that it was the kids who couldn’t pay attention in elementary school, or the parents who came to concerts and spent most of their time sighing and looking off to the side. Esme had a different take on it all. To be bored was to be better. The world had not done its part to entice us. She never said a word about it but her conviction was clear in her geometry, the parallel lines of her eyes and mouth: no smirk, no frown, straight horizons, rendered with power none of the rest of us could fathom. She was beautiful, too, severely so. That’s why we were all so surprised when she took a turn halfway through college, first to breathlessly study wildlife biology—she would talk about bears and wolves breathlessly, at a velocity an earlier Esme would have derided—and then to throw that over, marry a jangly, nervous man five years her junior, and became half of a famous mime act.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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