one death: tragedy / a million a statistic / incommensurate

[roc_on]

Beila gives Dao space. He is extremely right that she's not the best person to be sad about his dead serial killer friend with and that seems to be his principal occupation, so - space.

Comments

[roc_on]

"That's... not what I mean, although it's in the neighborhood..."

[thinklikethis]

"Then I kinda don't know what you're asking me for."

[roc_on]

"Maybe I should just explain the thing I do instead of trying to guess at the thing you're doing. Like... imagine everybody in the world all formed a line. On some surface long enough to hold a line of everybody in the world. And absolutely everybody in that line it is my very own personal job to make sure they have a happy fulfilling life. But I'm not omnipotent and even if I were that would be really hard to do for everybody all at once. So I have to put the line in an order. Does that make sense?"

[thinklikethis]

"Iiiii think so? Although if I tried it I would go crazy, because wow?"

[roc_on]

"Well, I mean, this is not a literal line, I can't account for everybody in the world. But I can make a good guess about who's on the ends of the lines when they rise to my attention. Everybody anywhere on the line still matters. If I could help, like, the bottom half of the line or the top quarter of the line, and those things would take the same amount of time and cost the same in - resources-in-general, with the well being of other people on the line being one of those resources - then it would be better to help the bottom half than the top quarter. But that's usually not the case because the easiest way to be at the top part of the line is to be helping, is to be looking after some of the other people on the line somewhere and making it so I don't have to worry about them directly."

[thinklikethis]

"Okay..."

[roc_on]

"And the easiest way to drop to the bottom of the line is to start killing people and I feel like you resent me for making that tradeoff, maybe because it involved uncertainties and I wasn't positive he was going to kill anybody else?"

[thinklikethis]

"I... don't, or I don't think I do," he says. "Or. No. I don't resent you. I don't, I just, I..."

He trails off.

"I wanted him to be okay."

[roc_on]

"I wanted him to be okay too. But I didn't have a safe way to do it."

[thinklikethis]

"I know that. I just."

He rubs his face with both hands.

"You're the first friend I ever had. And Jun is the second. And Sora is the first person I ever... felt like I understood? Like, I don't even know if understood is the right word. But. I don't have that many friends in the first place and I never met anyone else who was as much like me as he was and that's why I'm so wrecked over the whole thing. It's not... I don't think you should have done something different? I think I would've done something different but you're a different person from me."

[roc_on]

"Maybe I'm not getting the significance of the resemblance..."

[thinklikethis]

"Probably not. You don't have weird problems like my weird problems."

[roc_on]

"That's true."

[thinklikethis]

"Which is great, I wouldn't wish my weird problems on anybody. But it does kinda mean you don't really know what being me is... like."

[roc_on]

"Yeah. ...which kind of bothers me."

[thinklikethis]

"...What do you mean?"

[roc_on]

"I dunno, I just - don't really understand you, and maybe you don't really understand me, and I'm not sure we have a way to fix that?"

[thinklikethis]

"Do we need to? Like, is that a thing that needs to be fixed?"

[roc_on]

"It's not the end of the world if we don't or anything but it might keep bothering me."

[thinklikethis]

"Well... I don't know what to do about that," he says.

[roc_on]

"Me either."

[thinklikethis]

"I guess I don't know... why you want to know what being me is like? Being me kinda sucks."

[roc_on]

"I like understanding things. Even things that suck. And I'm your girlfriend, I was expecting at some point I'd - know more about you on a deeper level than I've managed? I don't know if that was a realistic expectation or if I'm just being impatient or what."

[thinklikethis]

"I mean... if there's something you want me to explain, I can try? I'm just not sure it's going to work. I feel like... there are a lot of experiences in my life that you don't share, and most of them are bad experiences, and I don't know how to explain what they're like to somebody who, like, doesn't really have a 'hate yourself' setting as far as I can tell."

[roc_on]

"I... don't have that lever, no..."