flâneur

Question Mark | Issue 39 | n+1 | Jenny Zhang

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Where did this belief come from, Julie wondered, that she had to please everyone, that she had to do what she was told, that she was so powerful that to deny someone what they wanted from her was to kill them? Literally, an act of murder.

No one had ever loved her out in the open. Unconditionally. That had been Julie’s problem from the start—nobody, nobody, ever wanted to walk out into the light with her, even though they all needed and relied on her to break open their emotional seals. I’ve never told anyone this before, they said within minutes of meeting her, before launching into something they had kept shut up inside them for decades. I didn’t even know I felt this, they said after a full minute of sobbing about their childhood pet who slept in their bed until they went away to college and, shortly thereafter, died in…

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