The Sympathy Store – Nadia Niva

September 16, 2025

We who have emptied everything from everything, so there is no difference between towns or cities from an exoskeletal perspective, ride the train past rotted machines, unable to tell whether they retain utility or just take up space—stuck dead things with no one to visit them when the sun’s just rising too brilliant in the East and one thinks of Jesus, of his pain, of an open window. How many train passengers imagine being fucked discreetly, from behind? How many are unafraid to be penetrated by all that sound and motion, or like me are reading something full of sex—sex with Jesus at that. I know you’re wondering but I can’t get into this. Reading also a book of email correspondence between the crazy genius and the obnoxious intellectual. High sexual charge in these things. I wish to be as interesting as the crazy genius. Alas it is hard work being a genius and harder work being crazy. Is it better or worse to be both simultaneously? This is the train, and I’m saddened by the nonstop towns because I do not know their names. A young man jogs past who are you young man?

Someone sits down next to me, they are holding a jumbo roll of plastic wrap. There is a bag of items in their lap. It looks to be a bag containing mostly other bags. They are watching a Ronald Reagan documentary with the sound on. My water bottle leaks all over my seat and they give me a canvas bag to sit on. Social leveling of the train. How did I not once think of Alette? Am I so dense as to forget my very recent history once I’ve occupied myself with something else? The emails in my book are engrossing because they are ugly, unedited, embarrassing. They reveal a desperation, especially on behalf of the obnoxious intellectual, that is easily obscured in theoretical works of the type this writer tends to produce.

I am so limited by the line, I am unlimited in my heart at times but limited by the line. I say “at times” which is itself a limitation. The line obliterates my vision. Whereas now the blank space yields to me and there is a liquid quality to thought as it comes to form on the page. Nothing else can do this for me. No one else can be alone with me the way I can.

I’m telling my father about the crazy genius and the obnoxious intellectual. His sister was not crazy but she killed herself before she turned fifty-five. It is as if I’d forgotten about this. “To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.” This is what it says on the website for grieving her. Thomas Bernhard writes in The Loser that if you don’t kill yourself at fifty, you’ll kill yourself at fifty-one. If not fifty-one, fifty-two, and so on. “When we cross the threshold of our fiftieth year, we see ourselves as base and spineless… the question is how long we can stand this condition.” That I’m halfway there is its own miracle.

There is something noble about being actually crazy and writing an email, this is the crux of the thing I am communicating to my father, and there is something ignoble about putting on airs when someone else is baring their crazy heart. Something like this is the point of writing, and reminds me of my aunt who we all misunderstood. She keeps me company on the train ride over the long Columbia, the soon to be burning trees, looking out on this miserable human lottery from the back of our collective fairy godmother, cresting over the ridge.