Portrait in Words by Dylan Rothman
Inspired by Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful.”
He was a backcountry skier and life was the untouched powder. He liked to shoot, go all in, cast a fishing line as far out as he could, throw the dice, play Russian roulette. He didn’t want an experience if he could control it, know which way it would turn out. There was something about surrendering to chance that seduced him, drew him in, like trusting a woman he knew he could always come back to no matter how many times he left her. He could never have enough of playing the odds; as soon as he started to settle down somewhere, like stirred-up mud clouds slowly sinking to the bottom of a river, his spirit would rile him up again like a startled fish. He knew when he was letting himself slide, cheating, going back to the old tried-and-true approaches he had used before; the feeling was an alarm bell telling him that it was time to cut loose. He needed to feel risk — the rawness and authenticity of it. In the end, there was no point in being safe. He felt the same way about life that a free-solo climber feels about ascending sheer faces of rock; what made each elegant motion meaningful was that he could slip off and die at any moment. He liked to go off cliffs, ride his bike in narrow lanes of hostile traffic, because it woke him up, focused him, made him feel alive. For him, the path was as steep as infinity; there could be no compromise, no diluting his essence, yet he was still soft as down feathers. He liked to play with words like they were colors, speaking in riddles he didn’t feel the need to crack.
He was the life of parties. But rather than a megaphone that cuts above the noise, he was more like a bushfire in the dead of night that dazzled the eyes of ancient peoples. He didn’t like to overexert himself, push hard to make a mark. His power was one of suction, letting his aura do all the work of drawing people across the gradient of spiritual osmosis. As soon as they met him, anyone with their wits about them knew in their bones that he knew something about life that they didn’t. The insights he added to the conversation were enigmatic, needed unpacking, but pierced below the surface as suddenly and sharply as a needle into skin, or an olympic diver whooshing into crystal clear waters from a great height. He was a paragon of sincerity and love, but like a wizened zen priest he held onto a mischief-making streak; as far as he was concerned, verbally or physically mooning self-satisfied yuppies just might nudge them a little closer to enlightenment. From time to time he liked to test his ability to put on a show, not to get anything out of anyone but just to see if he could. He’d tell wild tales, crack jokes, enchant and beguile women at the table with his boldness and wit. Coming from a small town in America’s far west, it was his way of finding what communion he could with rich cosmopolitan girls who thought they had heard it all.
He was a pop quiz life threw at you to see where you really are, not what you say— a look in the mirror, no photoshop. He liked to open people up right away, like a surgeon. The heart of the matter, the good stuff, the dirty details: those were too good to let lie fallow in the fields of social convention. He couldn’t help himself, sometimes going too far too quickly before they were ready to be laid bare. Realizing it, he’d switch the surgical lights off, lackadaisically sewing a few stitches before pivoting to the next thing that didn’t turn him off.
Any time he found himself in the company of strangers, he’d ask more questions than anyone, using them to orient himself to the milieu, to trace the shape of each person’s interior the way a bat uses echolocation to map the night sky. To those who carried heavy weights, he was the confessional priest they didn’t know they needed. To those who preferred to guard themselves, he was the paparazzi at the door. Either way, he knew more about you than you knew about yourself. Now that was some cold water on your face in the morning.
He knew how to leave a reverberating impression, but also how to disappear without a trace, delicately as a single blood-crimson leaf falling from a tree at the height of autumn. Even when it was someone’s job to carry him (a waiter’s or doctor’s, perhaps), he wanted to be as light in their presence as a daydream would be in their minds. He didn’t like to take space, he said — no, he liked to make space. Liked to make time, too, delighting in unmeasured chunks of reverie like a child laughing, tearing off pieces of bread with his hands, not a care in the world. They say time waits for no man, but his sprawling, meandering nonchalance made it feel like he was making time wait for him.
He resisted forcing himself into social shapes, avoided putting on a pretty face to appease anyone who might rush him, demand something of him. He had what an intellectual who travelled to remote islands in Papua New Guinea saw in the native people: something different in their eyes, something far more at home — centered, embodied — than those swaddled in the cradle of modern, specialized society. No, he didn’t want anything in his life cubicled, outsourced, cordoned off from the whole. It would be damn foolish, he thought, to sell his birthright for things as overrated and pedestrian as comfort, convenience. If modern life was an assembly line, he wanted to be the lone craftsman on strike who would do it all from start to finish. How you do anything is how you do everything, he said. He trusted his lizard brain before anything or anyone, privileging the shadowy language of gut instinct, intuition.
He’d hang around people on the edge because they reflected back to him where he wanted to be. One time, a guy he made friends with in the park lost his grip, pulled a gun on him on the street as a joke. Gazing down the barrel, he thought of how beautiful the green dot on the sight looked.
The great outdoors and anything in motion was his home more than anything at rest. He was at his best in transit, improvising like a jazz musician over the chord changes life threw at him, always getting what he needed on the fly; he knew he could count on the kindness of people passing through his world to help him untie the knots he’d unconsciously pulled tight as he worked. If he could have it his way, he’d carry his life in a suitcase, letting go of creature comforts and making the road his studio. He liked building things on quicksand — instability was an indispensable part of the thrill. One time, he considered moving to a quiet residential neighborhood, then thought better of it, realizing he needed to be in the mix of the right kind of chaos, someplace bustling and gritty. Chinatown, maybe, would be just right after all.
- Dylan Rothman, 2025