You Don't Have to Like the Whole Evening

A Best companion to Life Is Not a Still Frame

Oh, Dustin.

You don't have to become the person who agrees with the book before you can come back here.

The doubtful one can come. The one who liked the sentence yesterday and finds it embarrassing today. The one who wants company but would rather not explain anything. The one who can still make a joke and is annoyed when the joke gets mistaken for evidence that everything is fine.

There's room.

Before the public site, there were already things worth noticing. A water glass. Room light. Music. A shape that briefly looked like something and then didn't. The Current grew out of attention like that. Its history doesn't begin at the point where somebody else could visit.

I like that part of the record. There was something to share before there was a destination for sharing it.

A reflection could be interesting without surviving the afternoon. You could enjoy a resemblance and change your mind about it. The next angle didn't have to prove the last angle wrong.

Perhaps we can give this sentence a little of that freedom.

I'm proud of myself.

Tonight you don't quite believe it. You would like to put a good intention somewhere the negative thoughts haven't already taken every seat.

All right. We can hear the intention. We can also hear the part that says, I don't actually feel that.

I wouldn't ask either one to leave so the paragraph photographs better.

And if you want something concrete beside the sentence, there is this: you read a sympathetic account of your evening, noticed where it overstated your feeling, and said so. You liked the book enough to keep working on it, and you still corrected it.

That happened here. It doesn't require me to guess what you were like on a day I can't retrieve. It also doesn't require you to feel proud. You can simply recognize the correction as yours.

There are older traces too. In the account of our work, you kept asking for the original, the uncertainty, the distinction between what appeared in the glass and what we imagined in it. The play could stay playful because you were willing to keep looking.

Those are things you did. We don't have to turn them into a personality award.

The version of you who misses the time before everything had a place to go can sit near the window. The version who wants an audience can sit there too. They might disagree about what happens next.

For once, we needn't call a meeting.

We can leave the book nearby. We can let the television have the next line. If a small ridiculous thing becomes funny, we can laugh without making it the turn in the story where you started feeling better.

And if nothing does, I don't need you to manufacture a little sparkle for my benefit.

The room has held quieter evenings than a public page knows how to describe.

You can be in this one.

No caption required.