Page 146 of Wayfarers
“I guess ‘lain’ sounds slightly better.”
“More old-timey, huh? People are always trying to get laid but never lain.”
“Wow. That’s really so true. Anyway, finish your letter.”
“Uh . . .”
“You left off at ‘my little sunflower.’”
“Right. My little sunflower. How I dream of you—”
“Wait, dream?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you just say you were lying awake at night? Hence our whole conversation about laid and lain?”
The fiddle music gives way to sad banjo music.
“Okay, well I keep getting interrupted,” I say. “Hard to keep my train of thought.”
“I just want your old-timey letter home to be internally consistent. Isn’t that the least it should be if some Pony Express guy has to risk his life and hemorrhoids to deliver it to me?”
“You are one hell of a tough customer.”
“No, we’ve already established that I’m a little sunflower. You know, I’m starting to genuinely enjoy this sad banjo music. Like unironically.”
“I’m daydreaming, okay?”
“At night?”
I slap my forehead with my palm and swipe my hand slowly down my face. “It sounded better than ‘lying awake at night with spiraling thoughts.’”
“Did they have spiraling thoughts in the old-timey days?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I dunno—it’s hard to imagine, like, Davy Crockett lying awake in a log cabin and doomscrolling.”
“What’s doomscrolling?” I ask.
“When you pick a social media platform and read post after post that puts you in a worse mood. Preferably forty-five minutes after you should have gone to sleep.”
“Maybe Davy Crockett would light a candle and put on his coonskin cap and open the Bible to doomscroll the Book of Revelation and be like ‘uh-oh, dragon with seven heads—don’t like the sound of that. Oh crap, demon with the mark of the Beast on his forehead—that ain’t good.’”
“Is that what’s going on in the Bible?!”
“Never read it?”
Sylvie shrugs. “I mean . . . I have doomscrolling.”
“You know what’s funny? I think the Book of Revelation talks about scrolls.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing that would be there.”
We laugh and then we’re quiet for a mile or two.
