Where You Never Had to Ask to Sit
“as good as a person only feels in a place where they have never once had to ask whether they may sit down” While Simon holds the bottle to his cheekbone, Jacob scrolls through the screen “the way you go through your own closet,” talks to it the way you talk to a team, eats over the cardboard, dropping crumbs into it “as if that was exactly what it was for,” and, asked about plates, sincerely asks: “What for?” He feels good here — “as good as a person only feels in a place where they have never once had to ask whether they may sit down.”
The author puts two bodies with opposite histories in one room: one has spent its whole life asking permission to exist; the other never once considered that permission might be needed. This is not a reproach to Jacob — he did not choose privilege, just as Simon did not choose the wall (see “A Surname Like a Password”). But it is precisely out of this difference that three years grew: someone who has never had to ask finds it hard to notice that the other cannot say “no.” The evening on the sofa is the first in which Jacob begins to notice: he watches Simon chew on one side, and “didn’t reach for his next slice right away.” Attention to another person’s body as someone else’s, not as one’s own — this is where everything else begins.
