Hello X,
Here is an
email. You should write one back, if only as an
exercise.
Last night I
sat ensconced in my sarcophagus bed, staring at my computer. The
essay topics
for philosophy class had just been emailed, and were confusing, so I read
them over
and over until the words no longer registered. This made me feel
feeble-minded.
I closed my laptop and rolled over.
I was in
that soft buffer before sleep when B entered the room, on her
phone with
her mother. The lights flashed on; B complained about how
awkward it
was to start dating someone right before Valentines day. A pause as
she
listened. "Okay, but what am I supposed to do about the other guy? He sent
me flowers
too." I
rotated to face the wall and pulled my duvet up around my head. "Mom,
you don't
understand. Ugh. Never mind. I can't talk. Someone else is calling.
Yes.
Bye." She closed her cell phone loudly.
Then C poked
her head into the room.
"Is Y
here?" she asked. "No," B replied. "Unless she's
sleeping." She
leaned in
and lifted the bedruffle to observe me. I played opossum, keeping my
eyes shut.
"Yeah, she's asleep." There was no modulation in tone or lowering of
voice. Exit
C.
For the next
half hour B proceeded in a symphony of distraction. She opened
and shut
drawers. She shook a bag of jellybeans (or perhaps a rain stick,
although if
she has one she has been hiding it from me) and then turned her
computer on
for some light musical accompaniment. Rap should be blasted, I
think, and
to hear it dribble out of her little speakers was worse than full volume.
She sang
along to Eminem in a very cute way, though.
I fell
asleep before B did anything else worth mentioning and woke in the
morning to a
room vastly cleaner than I'd remembered it. I felt terrible for
being so annoyed
with her the night before, and resolved to repent in generosity.
The subject of
this email is from Plato's Symposium, which I have been carrying
around as a
prop book for a while. Particularly, it's from the section where
Aristophanes
describes how the gods bisected the hermaphrodite and made it into
two unwhole
parts, male and female. "If they still complain after I have cut
them in
two," Zeus claimed, "I will cut them again so that they hop on one
leg."
Very close
to being bisected again,
Y
