Page 55 of That Weekend in Paris
Dillon looks off to the side for long enough that I wonder if I’ve said too much. “It would be sad to think that’s true,” she says. “But maybe on some level, it is. Do you think you deserve to be happy, Klein?”
I answer before giving myself time to think about it. “I don’t think I deserve everything I have in life.”
“Why?”
“Maybe because some part of me thinks I’ve been lucky. That I’m not any more deserving of it than some other guy who’s worked hard to develop his talent and maybe hasn’t gotten anywhere with it.”
“Or, do you think,” she says, “it could be because of what happened in your early life? That because your parents made the choices they made, some part of you thinks that says something about you?”
I consider the question, realizing without too much thought that she’s probably hit on an undeniable truth. “Maybe,” I say. “I think I know why you’re such a good writer.”
“Well, thank you, but—”
Before she can finish, I say, “You look not only at the person but their why. You go below the surface and dig around until you’ve found the answer to what makes them who they are. You’d also make a good therapist if you ever decide to get out of writing.”
“Ah, thank you, I think,” she says.
“It’s actually the highest form of compliment,” I say. “You listen to what other people have to say, but you actually hear them. Not too many people can say that. Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you’re talking to someone you can see in their eyes that they’re not really listening, that they’re actually thinking about what they’re going to say when you’re done?”
“Yes,” she says. “So true.”
“And you don’t even really want to continue what you were saying because you know they’re not really interested.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess we all struggle not to be that person because even though we know better and don’t want to admit it, we’re all actually more interested in ourselves than other people.”
“True,” I agree. “But to be a writer, you have to be able to hear others, and I think you do, Dillon, whether you are exactly aware of it or not.”
“In all honesty, I’m not sure that I get any bonus points for that because it’s probably more about my own curiosity than it is about my interest in them.”
“You might be selling yourself a bit short.”
“And I think you’re being kind.”
“Just honest,” I say.
“We’re all selfish on some level,” Dillon says.
“The price of being human. Hard to get out of our own way, isn’t it?”
“Definitely,” she says, sighing. “But I don’t know. After everything I went through being sick, I started seeing life differently than I had seen it before.”
“How so?”
“Um, I mean, we all know we’re going to die. We learn that early on in life, but somehow I’m not sure we really believe it until we’re faced with our own mortality. It’s like it’s not real, or we think on some level that it happens to other people, but it won’t really happen to us. And then one day you hit that wall where it becomes very, very clear that your body has a stop point, and things just start to look totally different.” Her voice drops a note or two, serious now. She looks out the window.
“There’s a reason why someone came up with that saying that youth is wasted on the young. I guess it’s also wasted on the uninitiated. By that, I mean, those of us who haven’t yet hit that wall, realized there really is another side, and when we do, at least for me, it was impossible to look at my life as I had looked at it before. Now, it’s like I want to get as much from every day as I possibly can. I want to give back in ways that I never did before because I understand that is really the only way I can leave something of myself here. What I give to others.”
She trails off there, and it’s a good bit before I can bring myself to speak around the lump in my throat. “You might think, Dillon, that everyone comes out the other end of what you went through feeling as you do now, but I don’t think so. I think you’re rare in that you took something awful that happened to you, something that would break a lot of people, and you allowed it to make you stronger. It would be very easy to let something like that break you. I’m pretty sure it would break me.”
“I think you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for,” Dillon says.
“You’re strong,” I say.
“I’m stronger than I ever would have believed,” she agrees, surprising me a little. “But as I go along, I realize more and more that life is full of tests, and sometimes we pass, and sometimes we fail. I’m pretty sure where Josh is concerned, I failed.”
“You think you’re to blame for the problems you’ve had.”
“I feel sure I’m partially to blame. It’s almost never one person who’s wrong about everything. Sometimes I think I expected too much, like the fairytale version, or something. But there’s no such thing as a fairytale in real life.”
