What Comes Next

Institut fur Psychologie

After a fight, people are mean. They want to hurt. They want to punish.

High school graduation. A snapshot stolen when his son hadn’t been watching. He was grinning, filled with everything that was possible about the world and none of the heartache or trouble that was an inevitable part of it.

It was a little like the great conundrum all parents know, that one day they look at the child they raised and he or she has grown up and entered into a world of their own that seems alien and incomprehensible.

A computer, Adrian thought, is like a funhouse mirror. It reflects much about who someone really is, when one sees past the contortions and blurred shapes.

There was so much to love, then,” Cassie said. Her voice had a lyrical tone.

“But it’s all gone now.”

Sometimes, when she slept, he found himself staring at her, and it was as if he could see her aging, her perfect skin fading and wrinkling, the tautness in her body loosening. He would imagine the two of them growing old together, and then he would think that was impossible; they would forever be young.

Her ex was forever wearing a smile in public, telling a joke, making everyone feel good about themselves, till the moment they were alone and he’d suddenly turn dark and hidden and start to beat on her relentlessly.

Knowledge, she understood, was a luxury.

it’s often far more exhausting to stop than it is to keep going.