Human Stupidity and Other Outcomes
By Niklas Selenius-Osterman
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“Life only avails, not the having lived.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays, First Series
The piece is still descending.
We lose years asking the present to arrive in a more convenient shape. The body should have cooperated. The job should have appeared. The person should have stayed. The apology should have come.
Some of this is grief, and grief deserves its room. But the current piece does not wait outside while we finish arguing with the last one. It keeps falling.
You do not have to admire its shape. You only have to see it before it lands.
Snap.
The sound is already behind us. The piece has moved lower while we were explaining it.