05.07.2008

A Single Overwound String (an excerpt from the novel The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian)

As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string. I was too poor to even have an etherizing vice like drugs or alcohol. Slowly I became a Peeping Tom of finer days, a vicarious liver through my own past.

Years ago, forecasting the quality of my life to come was a cinch. By five years’ time–which would have been five years ago–I would’ve graduated with a degree in architecture, and with a guaranteed job in my father’s growing real estate development firm. In sum, I’d be kept in clover. Envisioning my future was like watching a lucky contestant on a game show, whose winnings increased with each spin of the wheel.