The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you.

Our relationship was a somewhat unusual one, not always easy for others to grasp.

But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial—people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

She’s the kind of woman who knows fifty ways to tie a scarf was one of the first things you ever told us about her.

You were the department’s youngest instructor, its wunderkind, and its Romeo.

A great teacher was a seducer, you said, and there were times when he must also be a heartbreaker.

What I did understand was that I craved knowledge, and that you had the powe...

Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching . . . This elemental fact has been trivialized by a fixation on sexual harassment.

a lined page is more welcoming than a blank screen for receiving intimacies and secrets).

Whenever I’d go to a reading I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for the author. I’d ask myself did I wish that was me up there, and the honest answer was hell no. And it wasn’t just me. You could feel it in the rest of the audience, that same discomfort. And I remember thinking, This is what Baudelaire was talking about when he said that art was prostitution.

Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won’t hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much.

I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.

Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

He fed her the lump of sugar from his coffee, which, he later wrote, was like reading mass together.

Now I am forced to talk. If nothing else, to explain why I don’t want to talk.

It’s not that I can’t say how I feel. It’s very simple. I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss you very much.

ear. I am damp-eyed with relief.

Anyone forced to contemplate an aging pet is like the poet Gavin Ewart wishing that his fourteen-year-old convalescent cat might get to have just one more summer before that last fated hateful journey to the vet.

One of the stems has bent, and the flower hangs down as if ashamed, or shy of the spotlight.

“I keep wondering, though, why I don’t feel more,” the man goes on. “A lot of the time I feel hazy, or numb, like it all happened fifty years ago—or never even at all. But that’s partly the medication.”

Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.