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You were alive again last night.
But the ease with which I can conjure you up, it feels like a curse. A parlor trick, but it’s ghoulish, a parody. It’s like waltzing with a mannequin.
Someone once said to me birth was the most ordinary and extraordinary thing you’ll ever experience, simultaneously, and death is the same. The fact of yours sits there, implacably, being so banal and so mind-blowingly strange at the same time.
This is what I never knew about loss—it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you.
Nothing for us will ever be the same. It’s like losing a leg and everyone coming to gather around the hospital bed, consoling you over the fact you only have one left, and walking out doing a hop, skip, and a jump on their two again.
Why am I the only one clinging to the past? The only one caring? Everyone else takes what they want and moves the fuck on.
No one said evil couldn’t be attractive. It’s how evil gets a lot of its workload done, in fact.
Susie’s deadness has crossed an invisible line, passed into an unexceptional fact I can rehearse as part of my mental furniture, as much prosaic scenery as the mini fridge and the safe for valuables over there.
They will live on in your hearts, and in the way you find yourself weeping like a freak in Birds Baker, because you inadvertently recalled how much she loved an Elephant’s Foot pastry.
Beware the Nicest Guy in the Room, who doesn’t think his failures are the same as everyone else’s.”
I sip my drink and think I have amateur-hour tangoed with an absolute ballroom professional here. His analysis is a series of controlled explosions.
“You’re an enigma, Finlay Hart,” I say.
“I think the rain’s stopped,” he says. I twist around to face him. “So do I.”
