beautiful uncertainties
“Why do you do that?” he asks me, while I’m rinsing off my brushes.
“Why do I do what?”
“Why do you write things you don’t believe on the tables?”
“I believe some of them,” I say after a moment, watching the blue and red paint-tinged water circle the drain in almost-purple swirls.
“You don’t believe that one,” he says, balancing a tray full of empty teacups on one hand so he can point at the still-damp letters.
find the beauty and adventure in uncertainty and you will be free
“I’d like to.” I can’t look him in the eye so I focus on my paintbrushes instead before adding “Maybe someone will read it and think whoever wrote it must have believed it and that will help them believe it, too.”
“I wish you’d just believe it yourself,” he says.
When I look up he’s already taken his teacups and walked away.
About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.
4 Comments
ahad · December 17, 2011 at 4:15 pm
i just finished nocturnes by ishiguro and somehow the beauty imbued in this flax-golden tale reminded me of the magic that inhabits our every day conversations and moments of ‘unspectacularity”…thank you for this, erin :’)
Marcheline · December 22, 2011 at 7:26 am
Me, too…
Ted · December 31, 2011 at 12:01 am
I like this! I often say to people that they should pretend they live in the world that they want to live in.
Well, usually I’m not so grandiose about it. But it does come up when I explain to people why I never lock my car.
T. Thrice Widdershins · January 2, 2012 at 10:16 am
Lightness and weight, ne c’est pas? Dizzying freedoms and crushing routine… and then you wake up, somewhere in the Pacific-coasted Third World, without power, and brew your tea over a leaky propane jet.
Adventure? Yes. Good lapsang soochong (which looks silly, in English, and smells like a tire fire in any language)? Not really.
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