Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world.

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. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear what she wanted to be.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

Booze—the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow. The granny of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club. World? she sneers. What world? And swings her cudgel at your skull.