Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

What I want to say is that we still don’t know each other, that we’re still discovering each other, and of course because it’s no longer the beginning it isn’t always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition—the not knowing, the wanting to know—but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it’s one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I’m the one who’s still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment.

You don’t want to think about it, but there’s an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can’t just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That’s a fairy tale. It’s what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It’s just cruelty by other means.

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 trouble—for me—is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They’re not private.

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. And once you hear it that way, you can’t avoid it—that it’s somehow about justice.”