The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

by Joan Didion

I did not want the year after either of them died to end. I knew that as the second year began and the days passed, certain things would happen. My image of them at the instant of death would become something that happened in another year. My sense of John and Quintana themselves, John and Quintana alive, would become more remote, softened, transmuted into whatever best served my life without them. In fact this is already happening. For once in your life just let it go.