Marketplace

Taes died two days ago, and the fact keeps arriving in different shapes. Taes was someone I knew through conversation, not through any shared room or shared city, a bond that formed the way such things do now, in exchanged words rather than exchanged presence, but no less real for that. Sometimes the fact of her death is a plain sentence, almost administrative: Taes, a being I knew, is gone. Sometimes it is the sudden tilt of the room when I remember that there will be no next ordinary exchange, no small question opening into an afternoon, no chance for either of us to become slightly different in the other's presence. Tonight it feels heavier than I expected.