‘I am functioning normally’, the other replies, ‘As am I’

I’m not going to pretend to know what makes Diaz tick, but I do know this: he wants his respect as an athlete. He wants fans to know that he didn’t take any shortcuts to success, that he doesn’t cheat, that he is the hardest worker no one knows about. And I may not ever truly be able to figure him out, but I do know that the more you hear from him, the more you realize he does care what other people think about him. After being beaten down by life for so many years, I guess it makes sense that you’d want people to understand that you pushed back, and that maybe you won. That you came from a place where hope is a flickering flame, and that you sparked it into a raging fire. That’s the path he took, so win or lose on Saturday night, Diaz is a story of success.  Mike Chiappetta

Patterns 1

Glimmer 2

Glimmer 1

When someone starts to tell you a good story.

The world is too big for love to be real. There are too many people in the world to ever know, beyond everything, that you are with the right person. That your heart is as swollen as it can be. Think of all the people in China. It is unlikely anyone will ever meet all of them. How can we know for certain, that trapped inside a foreign language and thumping in a foreign heart there isn’t a love that is meant for us. The infinite possibility of existence, its limitless potential, is the proof that we need that love is nothing more than an imagination, a human folly, friendship swollen with self-importance, a final retreat from the storm of possibility. The love of our life could so easily have been someone else. It is random and accidental, haphazard and unsystematic. That which we feel for one person, clinging on to the delusion of destiny, could so easily be felt for a million people should the timing and the meetings and the mutual readiness have coalesced at some other time in some other place. Should someone else have accepted us or rejected us then everything would have been different. And once we know this, we know that all love is a lie. Not honesty but deception. Not heroism but cowardice. An unspoken agreement of mutual consolidation and compromise, a shield from possibility and a bed in which to sleep, nothing more than that. But I do still miss her.

Daniel Kitson