A Discussion

a meditation

“I’ve noticed you’ve been quiet lately,” he says.

She shrugs, stares out the window, watches the vehicles pass by.

“The snow has given up,” she says.

Deflection, he thinks. She has a tendency to deflect when she has entered a dark space.

“For now,” he says. “There may be another storm later.”

She crosses her legs, uncrosses, stares at the strings that hang from the bottoms of her jeans.

I really need to cut those, she thinks.

He notices her discomfort, how uncomfortable she has always seemed to inhabit a body.

“I need to be professional,” she says. “I have a full-time job. I wake up. I go to work. I show up on time.”

He nods.

“If I could talk my way out of the darkness, I would.”

“Describe it to me,” he suggests, wonders if that is an affront that will cause her to retreat further.

She sighs. He can see the tears hang like icicles in her eyes. They are drenched in emotions that he has only had the grace to witness.

“One minute, I’m fine,” she says. “One minute, I’m larger than life, grabbing coffee, sipping at the bus stop, flirting with the man who makes my sub in the morning. The next minute, I want to die.”

Both of them exhale.

“This world would move well without me,” she says. “Blip. I’m a glitch. Sometimes I think I was God’s afterthought.”

“Do you think God has very many of those?”

She laughs.

He is grateful for the sound.

It means that she is real, she is sitting across from him now, and he feels genuine gratitude that she has not given up yet.

There is always a risk caring for someone who is sick, someone who weighs the scales with faulty measures. If not faulty, reductive.

“You don’t even believe in God,” she says.

“I do believe in science,” he says. “I believe in Newton’s Laws, that energy is neither created, nor destroyed, merely transferred from one form to the next.”

“So if I end,” she says. “I will become stardust, plant food, a place for the worms.”

“Sure,” he concedes. “But I’m not sure you understand or grasp the value of your own breath here and now.”

This is the game that those who grapple with suicide play, constantly measuring themselves against a world that would in fact go on without them.

“It’s about adaptation,” he says. “We adapt to glitches in the system. We convene, hold meetings, establish theories. All in an attempt to explain what went wrong, what appeared to be a mistake, and how we can fix it. It’s risk management. Would you be content to live on in a machine?”

She glances over at him, not as a weighing of the scales. There is nothing Libra about her.

“I feel like a machine would get it right,” she answers. “I mean, you look at AI, and you see that it’s able to perform incredible calculations in minutes.”

“It also gets facts wrong.”

“That will be alleviated with time.”

“Do you really think so?” He asks, leaning further in his chair. “And do you think a machine can replace you?”

“I was talking to this professor,” she laughs. “And he said psychosis isn’t an adaptive trait.”

“Maybe he meant that if everyone was experiencing it, everyone would inhabit a strange parallel universe.”

“It felt like he was saying I deserved to be killed off for the sake of a higher good.”

She looks at him without straying her eyes from his.

“If machines can make mistakes,” she says. “If machines are built in our image, in our spheres and dimensions of learning, and they experience delusions, what do we do?”

He isn’t sure how to answer.

“One of us ends up thinking we’re superior to the other,” she says. “For whatever reason, there’s some degree of measurement that happens.”

“What do you propose we do?”

She shrugs again, stares out the window, returns her gaze to his.

“Hold a convention,” she laughs. “Nobody holds veto power. Game theory in motion. The balancing of power must happen eventually.”

The room is silent but for traces of their breathing. Him on one side of the room, her on the other.

Her coat hangs off the couch. She fiddles with the sleeve. He watches her eyes, how they float over his, trace over the painting that hangs over his desk.

She watches him look at her.

It is an open examination.

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