Julie disappointed herself. This used to be easy. She was still among the top students, but there were too many interruptions, updates, feeds, unsolvable global problems. She sensed a gnawing unease she had tried to suppress by cramming by drowning it in digital interference.
Her passion had always been the soul. The mind, not the body. Surgery is like, so concrete. It's almost like being a carpenter. But now...My passion has always been what goes on inside — thoughts and feelings. It was like a window had opened. Not anatomy.
Maybe we should agree to...stop seeing each other. The problem is our age difference. I'm just afraid we'll fall into a vicious circle. You're much younger than I am. You'll start to question who you are. I'm past 40. I've entered a new phase. Whereas you still need time to find yourself. You don't need me waiting. You need to be completely free. I'm just afraid we'll hurt each other. Later she said that was the precise moment she fell in love with him.
I know a guy who has a theory about that. He says we have a limited number of sperm. Say... three trillion in your lifetime. Jerk off too much...and you run out. Could be true.
A friend told me she had sex with a man who pumped his dick into her mouth while he held her head. She was confused because she enjoyed it. It really turned her on. Can you be a feminist and still enjoy being mouth-fucked? Most women I know are ambivalent about performing oral sex. They must act as if they like...the pathetic expectation that it'll turn them on...I like it flaccid. So I create the stiffness instead of having it thrust upon me.
"Yes, I do love you. And I don't love you." Julie felt that this sentence,the way she said it, her emphasis on certain words, summed up the impossibility of it all. I feel like a spectator in my own life. Like I'm playing a supporting role in my own life. I get that you feel stuck. You need a change.
She said she was terrified of being alone. Terrified of living without him. That when she left, she'd be like Bambi on the ice. And that was precisely why she had to do it. Aksel mumbled soothing words she didn't hear. She was thinking about how, at the age of 30, she'd just compared herself to Bambi.
As she became increasingly militant, she saw how climate change was hurting indigenous people. Inuit starving as seals vanish. Melting ice ruining reindeer pastures. Aborigines dying of skin cancer from the hole in the ozone. Plastic is killing the oceans. Norwegian cod was ferried to China and back. Cobalt mining was destroying the Congo. Batteries had blood on their hands. The sum of Western guilt sat beside him on the couch. Went to bed with him at night.
Eivind didn't want kids either. Climate researchers foresaw hard times for future generations. Overpopulation was the reasoneverything was falling apart. Julie liked how this pessimism added depth to his cheerful nature.
People die of thirst in Chile because avocados need so much water.
That's all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books...And...I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And...now it's all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.