The first ten on today’s playlist:

Flights between the U.S. and China

How it started. How it’s going. pic.twitter.com/5vDhvryRcH

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) July 17, 2021

Damn.

I wrote this little snippet a few years ago. I think it’s pretty good. It’s from a larger story that was not, alas, pretty good:

“What we said was not what we were saying; we didn’t know how to vibrate the air to have any hope of correspondence with anything that we had been and were now. We stood there, less alone than any two people had ever been, but some bridges cannot be built, not with any act of commission or commiseration or brute construction.

‘I hope your eyes stay that shade of green,’ she said, and looked at her feet. ‘I always liked them. They’ve seen so much of me.’

I’m not sure if times were more complicated or easier then. In ways they are now not, then they just were. They were about to become less were and more of something else, something more present in the front of the mind, present and pressing like a stone over a chasm. We’d not really thought about anything beyond the moment for the past four years. We didn’t want to start now.”

When I want to show it, I have some talent. But writing like that is hard, even for me. I see why more people don’t do it.