Little arguments: stories,

, flash fictions from a work-in-progress,

~

Temporal linearity, as we know it, doesn’t apply to memory. A song that slips into your head is often a gesture, announcing the song will soon surface. Office background, car radio or one of your television shows: it’s more common than you’d think. You are remembering a song that you have yet to hear.

~

In a television interview, the filmmaker we both admire mentions how she never uses bookmarks. She has always been able to remember the last page she read of any book, and is constantly baffled by the inability of others to do the same. She glances, distractedly, behind her as she says this, somewhere off-camera, in the direction of the studio floor. What might she be looking at? Her films are like distances we have yet to reach, capable of articulating broad silences. When so many others are unable to comprehend that silence has a language at all.

~

It was not so much that we crave suffering, but to understand precisely what the suffering means.