Training Max: Chapter 2

Speaking to yet another foreigner now, she continued saying, “That’s just you sublimating the fact that you’re dissociating, Max. Of course you want to be taken seriously: if you don’t, then you yourself won’t.”

“I know that." And then, "Hm. This is getting deep between us, yeah?” Max thought, distracted from his packing. Pants, khakis, suit, tactical belt, toothbrush… What else, what else? Oh, coconut oil. Deodorant, for god’s sake.

“Well, it’s just me getting to know you. Is that a problem?”, she asked. And whenever she asks a question, she explained to him once, it was never to hear what she wanted to hear, as though the question was a test – she truly did not know, and was willing to pay the awful price of understanding, thank you very much.

“I didn’t say that, did I?” Perhaps it was a rhetorical sardonic question. He was good at those. After all, he dissected her father in seconds, concluding that she was the son he inseminated half of a town looking for, to no avail.

She reiterated, “It’s just me getting to know you. You don’t get to know me, after all – you don’t try. You don’t care,” again, she meant it, with no regret or blame, aware that he was going to be absent and she had a fuck ton of thinking to do in his absence. Starting with the statement, a rose is a rose is a rose.

To that, Max replied, not deigning to reply to her nonetheless well-meaning but less than graceful assessment, said one word, sternly, which he does rarely: “Chris.”

It was thirty minutes before he leaves for camp, and he was a wreck, increasingly getting neurotic – she had to remind him to bring two pens and two notebooks – he was surely going to run out of pages the first one.

She declared, “You always have imposter syndrome anywhere you go. You will always have it. Your dissociation is yourself becoming who you already were,” to which he replied yes thrice, as if neglecting all his life to realize this basic and obvious fact for the first time.

It was from left field, she knew: she was projecting herself unto him, as he did to her one time, when he said, “You get bored easily, don’t you?”  

She had asked him once, perhaps prematurely, too early in their relationship to warrant a judgment much less the question, if Max felt like she knew him well. He said he would say that she did, and that she made him realize things.

I. Am. Fucked, Chris concluded the phone call, cutting off his “I love you.”