"It is also heroically beautiful": Paragraph letter

Thursday 4/2/26

As it says.

***

Yesterday's paragraph actually changed some. The two versions side by side make for an interesting comparison in the choices in which one would be able to note, "Oh, I see why he did that, wow," when such a thing would not have been envisionable upon seeing the earlier example. The new version features in yesterday's Granta prose off, but, again, I still need to go over the entry and will send it along here after I do.

  I'm working fairly hard again and must compose an op-ed shortly. But first, this is another paragraph from "Still Good." The story is like "Fitty" and "Friendship Bracelet," in that if it was allowed to get up in the cultural jet stream, it would be news itself. Of course, no one is going to allow that to happen if they can help it. But these three stories are similar in that regard. The most revealing, necessary documents of "now." "Still Good" would be seismically impactful and I don't mean in some cheap, "here today, gone tomorrow" news cycle way. It gives voice to this world and the state of so many people in it in a way that nothing else does or can. It is also heroically beautiful. 

Instead, it will sit here, unseen, with me. That, incidentally, for all of the pain and horror that is my life, is the very worst thing about my life. The knowledge of what I have, and that it has no chance to do anything. I don't know how that can ever change.

By the way: I'm not diminishing any aspect in any regard of the final story by showing you these portions from it. That's not possible with how it all comes together. You will see. 

The sight of him knocking was more jarring than the sound because the glass made it hard to tell where his knuckles were going to stop. She jumped in her seat, which made me realize she still had her seat belt on, though I couldn’t remember if she did in the other videos, jerking the phone down behind her outer thigh like she was instinctively trying to hide what she’d been doing with the biggest portion of her body and rolling down the window all fumbly, finger slipping off the button at first, as if this was a drive-through where they came to you rather than the other way around and it took her a second to figure that out and make her free hand obey her brain while the other gripped the phone tighter.