Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

I decided the way we’d met would catch up with us. One of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails I’d anticipated the first night at the restaurant.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life.

This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

“The First Cut Is the Deepest” (is it self-pity when it provides no comfort?).

On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive—the backward ache. That’s what music is.

The music’s always about what someone’s lost. That’s what you hear, when it’s good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back.

had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.