Where Reasons End

Words are falcons, our minds the trainers.

No, our minds are the targets, he said, the prey.

Who trains the words then?

I don’t know, he said.

I couldn’t decide if the answer was an indication that he was losing interest, or he felt defeated. Perhaps the former, I thought. He had never given up an argument from defeat.

I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to.

You see, this is your problem. When you don’t have an expert command of adjectives, you don’t know how you feel.

A fish has only three seconds of memory, he said

occurred to me that he was indeed unable to see the physical world where I was. The leaves and the leaf-clearing rituals were abstract to him—he had not lived, since age three, in a place where leaves fell so profusely in one season. What else, which would have been merely new, became otherworldly to him?

Fear doesn’t speak reason or logic, I said.

Phobia is irrational, he said. You can be reasonable and logical in your fears

Where else can one turn to but nature if one needs endless details to sustain oneself, I thought. Nature is not small, I said.

You weren’t that interested in it.

So your brain is like a flypaper for words.

Orphan, widow, widower, I thought, but what do you call a parent who’s lost a child, a sibling who’s lost a sibling, a friend who’s lost a friend?

I told you nouns are limited, Nikolai said.

Words are, I said.