Look Closer

“So once you’ve abandoned your property, why do you have the right to expect anything whatsoever from it? Why do you have the right to object to what happens to it?”

There are many answers to that question, many distinctions and subtleties—the lifeblood of the law, what makes it so glorious. The most important part of law school isn’t the ABCs but learning how to think, how to find those distinctions, how to advocate for your position, how to highlight your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. How to fight with passion and reason.

—

After my early class, I walk down from the law school to the Chicago Title & Trust Building and make it there by ten. Once in the lobby with my Starbucks, I insert the SIM card and power on my green phone. I text:

And how are we this morning?

She replies quickly:

Well, hello, stranger

It’s become her standard start. My response:

Stranger? I don’t think I can be any stranger than I already am.

She replies:

Then how about: hello tall, dark and handsome

That brings a smile to my face. I’m not that tall, my hair is not all that dark, and “handsome” is overstated, but that’s good. I’m even willing to overlook that she didn’t use the Oxford comma. My phone vibrates again:

You’re not strange you’re enigmatic

Nice of her to say so. But no, I’m strange. My phone vibrates again:

I like your darkness. I like being your light.

I breathe out a sigh. At least one thing’s going right in my life.

21

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

This is a joyous, thrilling ride, but the end is a cliff. Is this what it feels like to be addicted to a drug, to ingest something because nothing in the present is so important as the feeling that pill or powder gives you, even while you know that the course you’re on will lead to destruction? You do it anyway, because you No, it’s not enough to say that “you do it anyway”—you not only do it, but you want nothing more than to do it, you embrace self-demolition over all else. Does that mean, perhaps, that was the point of it all along, the self-destruction, but you can’t be honest enough with yourself to admit it, so you wrap it up in something superficially and temporarily pleasurable like the high from a pill?

I mean, if the point really is self-destruction, why not save everyone the time and just find a knife or a gun and end it all? You don’t do that, do you? No, because it’s not the end you want but the suffering, the pain, the decline, the growing ruin as your body breaks down or your bank account empties or you fail those you love, you want to see yourself slowly degrade. You want to punish yourself.

Is that what I’m doing with you? Are you my addiction, Lauren? Am I punishing myself, allowing myself to get wrapped up in you again and knowing that you’ll just leave me again? Am I barreling toward a cliff?