1: You could, like, go all heat-death-of-the-universe on the whole affair.
2: Like lightly defuse it in a really micro way? Like the difference between a whole neighborhood’s worth of fourth of july fireworks and a pipe bomb? Clustered versus dispersed?
1: No, I guess that’s like way too obscene or spectacular or something. I was thinking more like letting everything become really vanilla. Attenuating the problem to death.
2: So rather than make a decision you think I should just synthesize myself out of it?
1: When you say it that way it seems less appealing. It would definitely land you in the outermost circle of hell depending on whose account you’re following.
2: Right, and it’s not like me to smooth things over. But it is like me to just turn it over and over in my head and then never really figure it out.
1: Yeah. But like, when you tell me that you’re having trouble deciding it makes me less inclined to, you know, commit to my own decision.
2: Your decisions?
1: Decision singular, not decisions plural. One was hard enough.
2: But that was so long in the making. Such a long time coming. And then it happened and it’s been such a long time since then.
1: But it was the difficulty of it then.
2: You can’t just flip a switch on something like that.
1: Flip a switch on what?
2: On the decision, or like obliterate the whole like universe of reasoning behind it.
1: I don’t get it.
2: When you’ve spent so much time and energy on a situation and built it up as this kind of monument to an experience that still rises up in your brain even after the experience itself is gone. You can’t just then topple that monument at the drop of a hat or on a whim or whatever.
1: I don’t build monuments in my head to anything. My head is the flatlands. I can see for miles across a vast and featureless terrain.
2: Yeah right. I remember back then when you were trying to figure it out you were falling back on all these aerial metaphors where the experience was giving you some kind of vertical advantage, some position from which to survey everything else.
1: Yeah I’ll cop to that but this is what I was saying before. You get far enough above everything, you get this perspective on everything, but then you keep going up and up and the things that you thought you could see all at once start to become these miniscule bits of information and then everything just goes grey and brown and earthy.
2: And those two points that seemed really far apart start to get closer and closer together. But that’s exactly how I don’t want to decide. Maybe it worked for you—although from what you’re saying it doesn’t sound like you built a very stable structure for that decision—but that stuff is exactly what’s gonna send me to hell, like to the outer circle if not the center like we were just talking about.
1: I’m sorry I shouldn’t have said that. I’m confident that I made the right choice. It’s just that seeing you go through the same thing is reminding me what it was like and of course that leads naturally to some sort of reflection or re-examination. Like I’m just trying to be empathetic right now, given the history.
2: Given that you’re now in outer space and like all of the tension has been totally dissolved and you’re up there looking at this globe that contains all possible conceivable decisions and the outcomes are really just like limited to this sphere so it doesn’t really matter one way or the other what I decide because its all just happening across the same surface anyway.
1: Right. Given that.
2: Right.
1: You could do the same you know.
2: What do you mean?
(REPEAT)