i can’t help it.

reitsc:

I can’t help some things either. 

Every morning I see a woman on the train with calla-white legs napkinned in an orchid-stiff skirt like a fork and knife. She always looks as neat as a pastry I want to eat. 

Other than the reader, the charwoman in that Kafka story is the only one to attribute to Gregor any kind of humanity or intelligence: intention, deception, emotion, and only insofar as she wanted to kill him. Do you think this is the only way of seeing one another as human? By hurting each other’s feelings?

I had lunch with two lawyers and their secretaries, and a paralegal with glassy pupils. I don’t have a personality, nor do I know how to talk like these people. But I’ve been reading the same Marianne Moore poem for a week now, I might be able to recite it to you soon. Fox-glove, giant snap-dragon. A salpiglossis that has spots and stripes. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can help that least of all.