The Dissident

... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down.

But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing.

Phil doesn't say yes, but he doesn't really say no. He's willing to ruin a person's life in order to keep her from being angry at him.