Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

My mother, who finds many things to be a pity, found this a pity.

Love was an affliction or nothing at all.

There is a point in all wars of attrition when the combatants begin to suspect that their purpose is not at all what they believed it to be, that in fact the war is its own organism, of which they are merely the cells, and that its sole drive is to go on forever.