The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with it's illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it 4 a second, I add "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all." Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could have never imagined Margo's anger bring found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.
She turns over toward me and ours her head onto my shoulder, and we lie there, as I long imagined lying on the grass at SeaWorld. It has taken us thousand of miles and many days, but here we are: her head on my shoulder, her breath on my neck, the fatigue thick inside both is us. We are now as I wished we could be then.
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"When I've thought about him dying- which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass- our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreplaceably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all not infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?"
She nods.
" I like the strings. I always have . Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seen more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings make us believe. And I like the grass too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but never quite perfectly, you know?"
