Haddon asked how I was and I admitted that I am not doing very well at all but added, for form’s sake:

“It gets better, right?”

“No,” he said. “Look, I loved your mother very much. She was a rare and dignified soul. When you lose someone like that, it never gets better.”

I was so grateful to him for coming out and saying it, I can’t even tell you.

—–

I mean, I’ll be fine. I am functional. Stuff gets done. I’m busy and engaged and tired. I love my kids and my cats and my Mister.

The trouble is that I continue to love my mother in the present tense.

…luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience…

It seems very straightforward when I say “I.”

…when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

I spent six months trying to understand how to do anything—not just how to get my message to the Lord of the Radch, but how to walk and breathe and sleep and eat as myself. As a myself that was only a fragment of what I had been, with no conceivable future beyond eternally wishing for what was gone.

It’s hard for me to know how much of myself I remember. How much I might have known, that I had hidden from myself all my life.