Meanwhile, in my head, I can still hear Sam’s voice. I think about the things I’d like to tell him, and I imagine what he’d say in reply. This isn’t the same as if we were having a real conversation.

It seems that confirmation bias draws me to passages and sentences (sometimes, mere phrases) about how loss is experienced. I am always struck by the feeling that I couldn’t have put it so poignantly or succinctly. Sometimes I find the emotion (or mixture of) only vaguely familiar, other times as I read I realize that though I had not been conscious of its existence before, I did in fact experience sentiment that echo what the author writes. The world is so big that someone is experiencing life-altering loss at every moment, every split-second; but it is so small that we can all relate. Isn’t that so good? Cheerios.

The article is available here.

.

From And They Said It Would Never Last by Curtis Sittenfeld