The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Sometimes I wonder if content is really just a synonym for complacent.

“What would a mediocre white man do?” she asks.

The deceased don’t immediately become flawless human beings. And it wouldn’t be right to turn him into one. We loved him, faults and all.

WWAMWMD?

“We don’t have to play tragedy Olympics,” Phil says. “What you went through was terrible. What I went through was terrible. Nothing makes any of it any less terrible.”

The thing about losing someone is that it doesn’t happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.

But maybe that’s what we all are—halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.