Rivers Solomon

Model Home

Lindsay

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on this scale. We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man- made road, eyes frozen and wide.

Their words will be derisory and remind me only that I am alone, but they will provide fuel for my self- pity, which is its own comfort.

Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.

My lovers are similar. They want me to be innocent.

I want me to be innocent, too. I want it more than anything. But I am not even an I or a me.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

It’s stupid to run from pain instead of to it because pain always comes, and if I could just accept that, life would not be a constant fluctuation between numbness and fear.

No, it actually doesn’t make sense. That individual abstinence from animal products does everything to ease one’s own sense of moral responsibility but does nothing to challenge the system. It eases guilt, not animal suffering.

Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

Maybe she isn’t a person. To be a person, you have to do things, and the world has to move from your touch.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. I can’t really live because I don’t let things die. Everything inside of me, it freezes. It’s natural. That’s what’s going on with my brain, these fractured bits of me freezing in moments of pain and death. My brain is kind of a dead thing.

you cannot separate yourself from the plight of others, cannot extricate yourself from the rope of pain we are all encircled within,

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