The news is terrible. You have to read between the lines. You have to let the margins challenge you (you have to like to be challenged). What if the desire to be challenged could be taught, could be learned? Is this the syllabus E is seeking, and others too? A top who knows how much pain to dole out per thrill, how much thrill per unit of pain? Or a relation fit to withstand an occasional, painful misstep?

They tried combining their syllabi, and then they tried rewriting them, and then they threw all the drafts in a pile. When they gathered, they asked for help and they let off steam, and sometimes they read aloud. They moved in with each other and swapped spots until it worked. At some point Kim disclosed that he didn’t like to sit, and now at meetings he wanders the room, occasionally jolting into a little sprint. They found out Kim had been named after Stan Robinson, the utopian novelist and an old family friend. They learned that MN had been raised on the road. Stella started taking notes and passing them around; the first read “I have a hard time talking in front of more than four of five people.” (They found out Stella had been allowed, at four, to name herself.)

Their agendas, if they were recorded, would be embarrassing, constituted by questions. (1) How do we keep the edges of our or any groups porous while still retaining enough history to not start at zero with each meeting? (2) How can we use imagination to pry fear from oppression? (2a) (How) can we protect each other during bouts of acute fear, individual or shared? (2b) What is the difference between transformative, shared fear and diffuse or performative empathy? (2c) If it isn’t possible to feel another person’s fear, what is possible in its stead?

They asked these questions in meetings but also outside of them. Each had individual questions that merged like cars on a highway; sometimes one or more of them went off on their own, or they left in groups of twos or threes or fours. Some of them put their arms around each other, some fucked. One might be accidentally pregnant and is living through the wait-and-see.