Many years ago, I wrote a short story called “Perfect Eyebrows”. It was in a series of stories I wrote that were based on me riding the Sobu Line from Chiba to Iidabashi every day for more than a couple of years. I think I sounded a lot like Haruki Murakami in the stories, but this may have been before that was a bad thing. I haven’t read the story recently, but I am hoping I didn’t personify the woman’s boobs in the story or anything. I officially apologize if I did, but I am not checking.

The story is about a woman who rides the Sobu. She is a strong business woman, and she has an affair with a man, and then the man leaves her. Well, it’s imaging all that happened, as the story takes place solely on the Sobu Line from the perspective of a handsome Canadian who is sitting down watching the interactions of the woman and a man.

It’s all shit all built up to one thing. This is how my English professor (the one who mattered) at Kwantlen University College’s Surrey Campus explained to us 18 year old suburban shits about the eighth of the nine stories in JD Salinger’s Nine Stories: De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.

Blue Period is a story that goes on and on for a short story. I love it to pieces though. The protagonist lies with such lack of thought, it is something the whole world can probably relate to. There’s fluff about something about New York and then these Japanese people and living in Montreal or somewhere in Quebec and it’s something. However, it all comes down to this one moment, where this young adult living in lies upon lies has an instinctual reaction that transcends all his lies.

In Perfect Eyebrows, in all that fapping around, all I was trying to do really was discuss one specific thing, and that is the moment in-between masks, where the story and how to act isn’t clear. The woman is looking forward to her lover getting on the train and he doesn’t show up. She knows it means he is not coming. She knows her face had allowed itself to be happy in anticipation, leaving herself vulnerable to be exposed by Canadians who observe their fellow passengers way too much. It was all about that split second before the cool hard mask came back on, and any sign of joyous anticipation was completely gone.

Isn’t that where life is? In the times when no mask will fit, and we’re left stupid and dumbstruck, not sure what to do? For the woman in Perfect Eyebrows, it was a split second, but it can be much longer than that before we refind our mask, or our narrative on ourselves to keep us warm in reality.

I’ve been thinking about that feeling, that complete nakedness where the walls of reality come down, and the options of re-evaluation or insanity. I think everyone goes for re-evaluation, but insanity is always the ELSE in the IF statement.

It’s much easier to talk about such feelings head in, but it’s much safer to talk about such feelings in a short story, because in a short story, you can have the faith that the people you don’t want to understand you won’t, and the people who you adore above life itself will understand. It honestly doesn’t matter if such people are known to you or not, as the possibility of someone reading a story with a tucked away meaning, and getting the tucked away meaning forever remains a possibility, even thousands of years in the future, when I’m sure this blog will still be going strong.

So what am I saying? Nothing. I’m just thinking about those moments when masks don’t fit.