05-26-2025, 08:47 PM
Sympathy for Near is constrained by all the other feelings Near has aroused, beginning with his disbelief at Jude's very first performance. To pinpoint a moment where things first went wrong, it was there. Every misunderstanding, every miscommunication, began when Jude cut his hand open and reassembled the glass, and Near brushed it away like it was a sleight of hand at a Las Vegas residency. Jude has never really recovered from it; he has had something to prove ever since.
What for? Jude is unsympathetic, but he isn't stupid. If he thinks about it, he can understand what things bother Near. It is that the cognition is stripped of emotion, the colors sucked out of the picture. He thinks, Fuck you, with an exhausted internal sigh, as Near raps his knuckles at the unsatisfying answer.
"I'm sorry for locking you in your floor," he says. There's a pause where they can hear someone getting into their car in the parking lot, rolling down their windows, and turning on their car, causing the local rock station to blare into the open air halfway through a song. "And I'm sorry for breaking you and your boyfriend up."
The latter he did not need to bring up at all, and as soon as Jude says it he feels he's shot himself through the foot, raising the specter of Guthrie just to self-sabotage. Jude is more sorry about the floor than he is about Guthrie; if he is interrogated on his sincerity in this area, he is sure he will fail to exhibit the necessary contrition. He holds his tongue after saying it though, hoping that somehow it will through Near and attention will instead go to the floor -- the whole reason that Jude has come back. He has not come back to solicit whether Near is still single.
What for? Jude is unsympathetic, but he isn't stupid. If he thinks about it, he can understand what things bother Near. It is that the cognition is stripped of emotion, the colors sucked out of the picture. He thinks, Fuck you, with an exhausted internal sigh, as Near raps his knuckles at the unsatisfying answer.
"I'm sorry for locking you in your floor," he says. There's a pause where they can hear someone getting into their car in the parking lot, rolling down their windows, and turning on their car, causing the local rock station to blare into the open air halfway through a song. "And I'm sorry for breaking you and your boyfriend up."
The latter he did not need to bring up at all, and as soon as Jude says it he feels he's shot himself through the foot, raising the specter of Guthrie just to self-sabotage. Jude is more sorry about the floor than he is about Guthrie; if he is interrogated on his sincerity in this area, he is sure he will fail to exhibit the necessary contrition. He holds his tongue after saying it though, hoping that somehow it will through Near and attention will instead go to the floor -- the whole reason that Jude has come back. He has not come back to solicit whether Near is still single.