“I am content,” Rudy often told Danny.
“Is that all?” Danny would ask.
“What else is there?”
Danny was always conflicted between agreeing, and being contrary.
“We spend countless hours simply filling our days to the brim. Work, relationships, hobbies. Anything to distract us. It has to be about the excesses—about finding our obsessions to live and die by,” Danny said, eyebrow raised.
“Are you asking or simply saying?” Rudy had replied, in that manner of his that made you feel as though you were intruding, as though he wished he were somewhere else with his nose-deep in a book. Yet he wasn’t.
“I guess both,” Danny confessed.
“You’re asking ‘What is life?’”
“Yes.”
“That’s like asking ‘What is a carrot?’ It’s a carrot!” here Rudy held up one of the orange veggies, pulling it seemingly from thin air.
“And, by that logic, then,” Danny said, snatching it from Rudy’s hand. “You’re telling me, that life is a carrot?”
“Now you got it!” Rudy beamed, summoning another carrot.”