Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love me. He’s just British about it.

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

I’ve never stopped wanting to give them at least some reason to think I’m getting better.

New York apartments either reminded you that you lived in one of the most crowded places on earth or allowed you to forget it.

He’s like his father: spending as if he has the natural right to live now as he plans to later.

Most all of who they are now was there then. They trace themselves no further back than adolescence because that’s when they began getting their ideas. But so much of them has nothing to do with all that. They are their natures.

It had been like this for a couple of weeks now. Tears welling up out of nowhere and running down my cheeks, as if I were a glass filled to the brim, spilling at the slightest motion.

Paul was fretting over lost freedom in some imagined future, while my body was stealing my mind.

I had given up years ago on being able to share with Michael what I myself went through day to day trying to be with another person, to ease my flinching against Paul’s expressions of love, convinced that what they promised would never last, would vanish without warning and cut me back down to the truth of loneliness.

It had no place in an aromatherapy regime, but neither did people with actual problems.

Though she’d always evinced the same easygoingness as her husband, I’d sometimes wondered if being laid-back was more of an effort for her, a thing she’d found in Kyle and successfully emulated rather than having been born into it.

I 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.