Other people’s words about … connection

‘So how is it [in prison]?’ I said [to Bunny]. ‘You look good.’
She did not look good. Her skin looked dull and she had a handful of tiny pimples on the left side of her face. Her hair was greasy at the roots. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I mean, I get by.’ She laughed.
‘Do you have any friends?’ I asked.
‘A couple,’ she said, licking up a palmful of M&Ms.
‘It’s just so good to see your face,’ I said, which was a lie. It was weird and sad to see her face. She didn’t look the same. But then she met my eyes fully for the first time, and the eye contact was so intense I felt I was falling, that if I didn’t concentrate I would lose consciousness. There was just her whole soul, right there. Looking at me. It was Bunny.

from ‘The Knockout Queen‘
by Rufi Thorpe

You know those moments when someone says something to you, or when you look at someone, and you feel a deep, true connection with them? That’s the kind of moment, I think, that Rufi Thorpe captures so movingly in the passage I’ve quoted today.

It’s hard to be frank in this way with another person, and it’s rarely sustainable, and so the intensity of the moment fades in the same way a bruise fades. That doesn’t mean you didn’t see each other.

It doesn’t mean you haven’t been seen.

Sunset, Deep Creek, August 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • And they broke into song: Yasmine El Rashidi on protest, fear, repression and hip-hop in Egypt today.
  
  
  • She began to sing then, low and lovely, in Pennsylvania Dutch. As she proceeded, the notes took on a tactile quality, a weight: dark birds moving through the night air: Rachel Yoder explores the fascinating world of Amish spells.
  
  
  • When I say that a book has made me cry, what I’m really saying is: This is part of the canon of some of the most profound moments of my life: As a fellow crier, I enjoyed Rachel Dlugatch’s list of reading to make you cry.
  
  
  • What look like lampposts around the field are actually vents that allow methane gases to escape: Rachel Kushner on post-street-life streets.
  
  
  • The pressure to have fun in the summer has always felt like a kind of tyranny to me: Jean Hannah Edelstein on motherhood in the era of social media.