love, read, write

I am a slow learner. I cruise through the world at a speed different than everyone else; while my friends whiz past me in both body and mind, I stagnate. I linger. I mull over ideas and let things settle before I move on.

It would be a lie to say that I am not affected by my comparative slowness to my peers. It feels, very often, as if the world is too fast for me and that I do not belong. Perhaps, in the busy world that we live in today, that is true. Perhaps I am disadvantaged by my speed (or lack thereof). But I must learn to, one day, convince myself that slow is okay. That slow is good. There is nothing wrong with taking an extra week to learn the material. There is nothing wrong with spending more time reading a book. There is nothing wrong with not being able to finish a test.

Capitalism has created a sort of economic Darwinism; he who is fast will make more money and will succeed more quickly. He who is proactive will get more; he who gets a head start will reach monetary success before his peers. And while to some extent these assumptions may hold true, it is certainly not the dominating rule in the game. Firstly, money is not always the most important. We often forget that learning is not just for money, but for the sake of finding out more about the world. In addition, speed is not just the most important. So is patience. So is initiative. Many people lack the speed but have the grit to reach their goals. Speed gives the illusion that your peers will get more done in less time, but in the end, we are all together blind, searching for answers we may never quite reach.

Even the greatest thinkers and the names we see in textbooks, the names that are left behind as legends, have been slow thinkers. It is not the speed of thinking that finds the answers to mysteries in the world; it is more often the quality of thinking. The philosophy that drives the mind. The reason that the person is thinking.

While I may feel inadequate, incompetent, and very unintelligent when I see myself surrounded by peers who solve ten questions in five minutes while I am still on number two, time will tell what is more valuable. We each have different goals. Perhaps for my friend, speed will give her the tools to find a quick job with good pay. But for me, jobs are not enough. I have bigger goals. And these goals do not require fast thinking but slow and deliberate thought processes.

One day, I will look back on my younger self and wish I had not fretted so much about the different qualities that I had. I will tell myself, "Thank God that I was slow. Thank God it took me a long time to do things. If not, I would not have been able to digest and re-digest and re-digest the information I learned to become the person I am today. Even brilliant people can be slow. Pace has nothing to do with intelligence, and intelligence has nothing to do with success. It is the mind that drives the body to its goals, not solely the brain." And someday, I will believe this with all of my heart.

It was his first time.

The sky bloomed into an uncomfortably ripe purple and rose, spilling blue-black at the fringes. It looked down at him, a small man in a small car driving at a relatively small speed.

The steering wheel was sweaty in his hands. His pants stuck to his legs and his foot felt like a rock, sinking into the accelerator reluctantly.

Cars, in their ephemeral colors and youthful speeds, rushed by and by, as if he were still, a lone driver sitting alone. But stillness was an illusion; stagnation was simply impossible. He was moving, alright.

He broke the silence with a curse, soft, to himself. He pulled off to the side.

“Foolish,” he said, leaning his forehead carefully against the cool glass of his window. It landed with a soft thud. “Foolish.”

Contemplation. And then he started the car again and left through the next exit. The car veered reluctantly into the parking lot behind Wendy’s, where neglected soda bottles and burger wrappers danced quietly between the painted lines.

More contemplation ensued over a bite of sandwich and fries. People continued to slosh around him in their daily lives.

“Foolish,” he said while swallowing a dry lump of beef and bread with ketchup. He stared emptily at the vending machine at the opposite side of the cafeteria. The coke was cold in his hands, and even cooler washing down his throat.

“You’ll know when you see him.”

His thoughts flew back to the days splayed across various walls and streets, a montage of cardboard signs and tin cans and begs for donations and dirty rags. The money—of course it was worth the money.

As if suddenly hit with an idea, his hand reached for his pocket. Rummaging produced a haphazardly folded manila envelope, creased unevenly along the left. His dirt-crusted fingers unfolded the flap and pressed the envelope’s hips inwards to see the inner contents.


Crisp bills, freshly printed. Five hundred dollars. A down payment and a sign that they meant business.

Five hundred was enough. He could make good use of it, he knew. He could buy a gun. A knife. Set up a scheme, hire someone. Something. Or he could, hypothetically, run off with the money, since five hundred was certainly enough to find a hiding place. Enough to stay low for a bit.

At the very bottom of the envelope, illuminated in the eerie, sick-colored yellow of the envelope sat the piece of paper with two words. Stephen McLaughlin.

Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin.

A bit of French fry got caught in his throat and he swallowed more coke, slowly and pensively. Stephen McLaughlin.

He imagined a white male in his forties, an architect that received little to no recognition, lived in an apartment, had a wife and one daughter who secretly smoked with her friends on the weekends. Slightly balding, protruding stomach. Raspy voice, good humor, a kindhearted smile. That kind of Stephen McLaughlin. He thought of this image hollowly.

This would be harder than he thought. Five hundred might not even be enough. Of course, they’d meant it to be an endorsement on the line—making it too easy would have just made it all a giveaway. Kill a man, get free money. No, it wasn’t as easy as that. You had to work for it. Nathan knew that. He knew that from the days behind that great wall of failure he’d hit in his twenties, when he was a tryhard teenager working for grades at school. School. He scoffed and a snort escaped his nose. His teeth sunk spitefully into the burger. School. People liked making respect and triumph sit with a raised chin on a tantalizingly high pedestal. Then when you got it, you realized it didn’t mean as much as you thought it did. School. He laughed bitterly.

He could start with phone books. Find all Stephen McLaughlins in the state.

But who knew where they came from? Perhaps it was international. Maybe Stephen McLaughlin wasn’t in New York. He could be in Washington. Five hundred would become a daily ration of $3 per day, then. Or what if Stephen McLaughlin was overseas, in China? Or Ireland?

The hamburger settled uneasily at the bottom of Nathan’s stomach. They hadn’t given him a due date. There was a reason for that. Nothing was easy when you made a deal with the devil. Signing up was the equivalent of writing down your own expiration date. It wasn’t a matter of staying alive—it was a matter of whether you were used to maximum capacity before your eventual demise. Nathan had signed up knowing this—he was very well in danger of being killed himself, but that meant very little. After a life of emptiness, he needed the million dollars.

By the time the soda cup fell into the garbage bin (lonely ice cubes rattling softly within), he was set on his next destination.

earthquakes are at once terrifying and beautiful; they speak of the fragility of even mother nature but they are so great, so powerful, so grandiose. we shiver at the idea of earthquakes, the beauty of soft soil crumbling into an even deeper abyss we are too afraid to venture into.
her fingers, brown and warm and welcoming, at once become claws, angry at us (for what reason? what have we done wrong?) and she swallows us, scratching from the inside outwards, raking in bodies and edifices and things in which we take pride. she swallows our pride. she eats our pride.
but in doing so she also swallows some of herself, letting trees and beautiful animals fall into the unidentified hellscape that is below, where perhaps fragments of buildings, leftover limbs, and misshapen animal carcasses all gather to have a tea party mourning for those above.
her children, the beauty which she has birthed (though prematurely--they are still attached to her) are taken back into her insides, where they will lay for the rest of eternity. why so? perhaps she is embarrassed of the creation she has made, and it is her way of bubbling up her anger and taking back some of the terrors she has caused, though inadvertently. she did not wish for this in the beginning. everything begins with a benign cause; catastrophe is never intended - it is only an effect of the element of existence. we cannot help but be impure and a curse to mother nature.