A balanced reaction

So there I was, man, standing in this hallway looking down and it was one of those railroad apartments that New Yorkers think is really cozy but really just seems like something out of hellraiser, you know? Like you turn the corner and you end up at the same corner, and finally you realize you are in a spiral and trapped forever. I guess spirals wouldn't really trap you forever - at some point a spiral has to end, right? It's not like a circle that way, it's not like you have to always find a new beginning and mark it or something. You have a beginning and an end and that's really all you can ask for these days.

Around the corner the apartment actually opens up a bit, like a scorpion or something. Like the door is the stinger and the rest of the place is the body and claws, clicking and clacking away, typewriters of nature. A thousand of them in one place could write a book about a monkey writing on a typewriter. Let's burn Bonfire of the Vanities later tonight, how ironic would that be? How deliciously ironic?

Anyways, she's sitting on the bed, right? Like just sort of sitting forlorn, and it jabs at me repeatedly when I look at her. I mean, I kind of want to be nice to her but I kind of don't and it gets tough when I think about it. All I do is, I end up sitting across from her on this big leather chest thing - I know that the top opens and I guess the designer didn't want anyone to know that it served as a chest as well as a bench, but it is pretty fucking obvious, right? Like politely ignoring someone puking into a ficus plant at an airport, especially when they are puking out something that looks like a bag of big league chew. Do you remember that gum? It came in a pouch like chewing tobacco and looked like chewing tobacco, and it was basically chewing tobacco for kids. I wonder how many of our generation have mouth cancer now because of some stupid gum we chewed on during little league games, that our parents gleefully bought for us.

Sorry man, I was distracted there for a bit. What? Yeah, I know, that's just something that I do...I feel like I can't really stop the brain from thinking, especially when it's thinking so quickly. Like normally I have one train of thought with lots of stops, but today I have lots of different trains and it gets a little crazy keeping track of all of them in my head, right? I mean, I'm not a MTA map or anything, all the lines are the same color, white as ghosts and bitterly cold enough to put in mugs of hot cocoa instead of marshmallows...again? Yeah, I'll get back into it, thanks for nudging me, and thanks for listening to me, thanks again.

So she's across from me and we don't say anything. I mean, it's one of those moments where you are afraid to interrupt the other person, and they are afraid to interrupt you and so nobody says a damn thing at all. We just sat there looking at each other's hands and I could hear construction going on outside, people yelling at each other, machines in that metal orgy of creation, that kind of thing, and I was wondering why life isn't more like that. Why can't people just talk to each other, yell across rooms and get their damn points across that easily, like pulling back on a bow and letting go? It just isn't that kind of world anymore - even when you try to be subtle and drop hints, nobody gets them at all. You might as well mail them around your state with those pictures of the missing kids and who they were last seen with. Nobody gives a shit, not even the people printing out the flyers.

-Rich
I know what you knew about letting our sympathies fail