You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"
"Yeah."
"Well," he said, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter.
An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday.
Jonathan TropperI don't have a career, I don't have a family, and I don't know what to do next. I've been so determined to escape anything permanent, and now I just feel like I'm nowhere. And what if that's the permanent thing by default?
Jonathan TropperThe only difference between a rut and a grave is depth.
Jonathan TropperShe got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.
Jonathan TropperStichwörter: sadness death travel crash plane vivid-descriptions
I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.
Jonathan TropperStichwörter: sadness grief depression fire drunk drink drunkeness
And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display.
Jonathan TropperIt's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.
Jonathan TropperI look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.
Jonathan TropperThat's the problem with college kids. I blame Hollywood for skewing their perspective. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily-ever-after is a foregone conclusion. So there we were, the pretty blond girl milking her very slight congenital limp in order to seem damaged and more interesting, and the nervous boy with the ridiculous hair trying so hard to be clever, the two of us hypnotized by the syncopated rhythms of our furiously beating hearts and throbbing loins. That stupid, desperate, horny kid I was, standing obliviously on the fault line of embryonic love, when really, what he should have been doing was running for his life.
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