The thing with being fine, though, is that when things change bit by bit, when life slides lemons to you in tiny little slices—like your mahjong buddies getting older and sicker one by one, so the mahjong sessions go from twice a week to once a week, then to every other week—it happens so slowly, so gently, that you don’t realize it’s happening until one day, there’s no one left to play mahjong with. But because of the slowness of the deterioration, you don’t realize that you’re no longer fine. You continue thinking, I’m fine, and you keep chugging along even though the small speck of sadness
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