This is something that is not me watching basketball

The incoherence of having someone not love you. Standing at the corner of the car, watching the daylight skitter across chrome, H watched the day fade. It’s strange to be the centripetal force that drives the universe, puts the planets in their orbits, orders the world and its actors and also to be nothing to someone. Surely no one else is having the surreal experience that you call a life. Remember the exact wrinkles and brown spots on the knuckles of your grandmother’s hands the month before she died. Surely this did not happen to a person; it happened to a person that is you. Every time you stand in front of a mirror you see yourself, or a version of yourself reflected. How could someone else not see it?

The strangeness of sometimes not wanting to be yourself; H watched a gull picking at trash before winging off with a brown bag in its beak. Some days, despite being the force that ordered the world H didn’t want to be himself. He found the prospect of slogging through day after day and month after month as himself to be wearying. No doubt he’d persist in it, but that didn’t mean he always liked it. Despite the sting of her rebuke, he could understand where she was coming from. Sometimes he was tired of him too. The wind was soft and easterly. He liked the wind because for him it portended the coming of a warm evening.

But really, how could she not love him? He loved her. Or felt something akin to loving her. Maybe she was mistaken in her feelings about him, or just needed more convincing. Maybe she needed him to back away for a few days, which would serve to remind her that he was interesting. Although, maybe she needed to hear from him again, reminding her with his words and thoughts that he was driving across the country thinking about her. Maybe she needed both. Was it possible to ignore her and pay attention to her both? What if she secretly hated him or found him unattractive or distasteful in some way?

Out the passenger window were rice paddies and iridescent headed ducks floating beatifically, like images of the countryside seen in magazines. Sometimes he’d point out a bird to Paul, something brown and small and ask him what type it was. Paul was the sort of person who knew the names of birds. To H, they were all just birds of slightly different sizes. Language was a mere remnant of what it sought to represent. He supposed that by using the precise word, a person could come closer to evoking the thing itself. Such a path of thinking was not conducive to passing a car ride in a pleasant manner. He missed Lauren without ever having had her.