Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

Celia’s ten now and beginning to notice she lives in a body,

But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.

With children, everything’s already happening and then over with. It happens while you’re trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.

I guess the lesson is, wherever you go, life follows you there, hunts you down, and abducts you (just kidding).

They strike me as the kind of overwrought liberals who are glad for the opportunity to finally be outraged at something actually happening to them.

He didn’t plant the monster in me. It’s older than him, and far savvier.

Then he became old enough to realize his questions were childish and instead of asking them aloud, he turned them inward.

But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.

My family will never know how they saved me.

It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving.

Where my mind goes, my body has never followed.

What we ignore only persists.

the semiconstant low-grade suspicion that he was inadequate.

If I love you, I have to agree with you. That’s the way it’s always been.

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.

A warm feeling, but lonely, too, because I loved him with more need than anyone I’d loved before, and when he slept I understood that he could leave me, and that eventually he would.

there’s an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure.

We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead.

He is so committed to his guilt.