Re: Living Room: Hannah & David
"She found the kittens in the shed behind the house, and Mom and Dad agreed to let her take care of them. They were really, really tiny, and she fed them with a dropper, and they had the tiniest little cries. And one, by one, by one, they died." It wasn't a happy story, and Molly didn't like talking about the kittens after. But Hannah still remembered them, small and helpless and making tiny sounds, and she remembered waking up and being excited to help Molly feed them, and then she remembered them dying and dying and dying. Mom had been angry that Dad had let Molly keep the kittens in the first place, but everything in the house always died. The kittens had to die too, and that was a reality that Hannah skipped right over, and she waded back into the subject of love stories. "Anna Karenina, at least right now," she said, mentioning the last book they'd all talked about a little. "I like to think that sometimes, some people can keep their dreams about love. Somewhere, somehow, that someone wins."
She nodded at his wisdom about the book, because what he voiced was an echo of the feeling she'd been trying to explain. "Right. It's about where I was at that moment, on that plane, and I'm not there now, and so everything is different. Life isn't a string. Life is all tangled and jumbled up, and there's not a straight line, not ever, but people like thinking there is. If there's a straight line, then it's controlled, and then things can be changed because they haven't happened, but that's not really how it works." She knew that with a certainty that she knew she wouldn't be able to impart to anyone who didn't already understand.
"I think most people are hard to talk to. Not you and not Si, but other people, and they want two feet planted on the ground. But mostly they want their own thoughts reflected back at them. They want a mirror, validation in a glass of spoken words. They don't really, really want to know what others think, not if it isn't the same as what they think." She'd learned that quickly, though implementing changes with the knowledge wasn't very easy at all. "When I learned what I was, I became confused and there were things that didn't feel like me. Now, little, by little, by little, all the me things have sprouted out of the dirt that had been smoothed over to cover them, and I feel really me. But I don't think you're damned. I think you might want to be. And I think maybe you want to be dead, and I think wanting is a strong, strong thing." She rubbed his arm.
As for the house and what it said, she wasn't really sure she could explain it. "It was loud. Voices overlapping. Like that tangle, that jumble of life, as if all these things were happening inside at once. I couldn't make one out from the next, but I could hear them all and they were cacophony. I told Mom, and I remember she just looked at me and looked, and nothing was ever the same after that," she explained, and she looked around the room with its warm chatter and its warm glow. "Thank you for coming here with me, David," she said, and she turned her head back and looked at him with a smile that was wide and bright.