Читать книгу Optic Nerve - Maria Juliana Gainza - Страница 13

THE ENCHANTMENT OF RUINS

You spent the first half of your life rich, the second poor. Not in penury, but always needing to be careful, always forgoing possible little treats, and often being forced to borrow when unanticipated costs arose. Hence the Silver Spoon syndrome that has always marked you out: the indestructible sensation that the money will come from somewhere. It isn’t that you delude yourself into thinking the coffers are overflowing, rather it’s like an unshakable inner security—yet another illusion, of course, only in your case a very convincing one. You belong to a class generations deep in the assumption that there will be a hot meal on the table every night. A blessing, very much so, but also something of a curse: never experiencing hunger has made you idle. (The reverse happens with rich people who grew up poor; it is a commonplace that the cold and the constant sensation of there never quite being enough enter a person’s bones, like a never-ending toothache.) You have the ability to get by on rice for long periods, partly because bad fortune never seems set to last; a better time is sure to come. And you do always try to steer clear of another of the pathologies that attends comfortable upbringings: Poor Little Rich Girl syndrome. That, to you, is not to be entertained.

Yeats spoke of the Celtic twilight, and warded off his melancholy by pouring himself into Greek translations. Dead languages have never been your forte, but you have other things, a manicure being the cheapest option you’ve come up with to keep your darkness at bay. And in general it’s worked, helping you to stay present, restricting your focus to that tiny portion of your self. Nowadays, if you let yourself become distracted, if there is some pause in the application of the nail varnish, why lie? You’re the very first to let ruins enchant you. Some days you are liable to be devastated by a broken nail, or a cuticle that’s ever so slightly too big, or the nail varnish chipping; and cracks suddenly appear in the dam that keeps all of your sadness in check.