Be Here Now By Miguel Syjuco Analysis

“Every day we fool ourselves, though some of us are more deserving of illusions.” This quotation from the short story named “Be Here Now” written by Miguel Syjuco and published in 2012 shows that sometimes in life, it will feel like everything is crashing down on you at the same time, and consequently you might find that to cope with this, you are distancing yourself, from what is most important to you. You create an illusion to handle, what is going on and thereby fool yourself into believing everything is okay. This is what happens to the main character of the story, when he moves into a new house with his fiancée, Jenna, after coming home from a job in the Middle East, where he spent the last month. Now, back in his everyday life, he feels

He works as a photographer for various newspapers, which is seen when he looks through some photos he has taken that made it to the front pages. Jenna is proud of him and so is he of himself, but he also says “… I often fight the feeling I’ve grown into a vulture.” This feeling stems from the fact that when he takes pictures, he exploits the hard situation people are in, so he can take a good picture. He has just been working a job in the Middle East and is still effected by the war going on there. As he describes it: “… it takes at least a week to negotiate the limbo between this world and the one I’ve left behind.” To do this, he spends most of his time on the internet, surfing around on different websites such as Twitter, Craigslist and Facebook, while he purposely avoids Jenna by declining every suggestion she makes. First here: “Jenna asks me if I want to smoke a joint and explore the neighbourhood. I tell her I’m too exhausted for anything but hitting the sack.” and then afterwards here: “No more sleeping bags, she says. Memory foam, she says, trying to entice me. (…) I’m not yet tired, I reply…” Here it becomes clear, that he is refusing to spend time with her, no matter what she proposes, because he says he is tired, but then he does not want to go to bed. When he is on the webpages, he ponders life and asks questions like: “Could that really be true if you need to declare it? Is it less true if you need to memorialise it before it’s gone?” after he sees “… perfect pictures from an imperfect life. ” In this part, it also becomes visible that he is probably not the most romantic man, as he calls the display of love on social media: “… implied incompleteness, tacit neediness.” By surfing the internet and commenting on other people’s lives, he escapes the reality of having to deal with his own. This has a great effect on