Bokelskere.no

When he was alive, I had felt no need to think of him constantly. I knew that he was there. Forgetfulness was normal. After he died, I had turned my body into a memorial - an inert gravestone for him. To be awake meant that there were moments of amnesia, and those moments seemed to annihilate Mattew twice. When I forgot him, Matthew was nowhere - not in the world or in my mind.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

"Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs."

I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you pressed on the picture, and I thought that if you didn't, I would go crazy, but I didn't go crazy, and you never touched me then, not once. You didn't even shake my hand.

Because my colleagues and students know what I’ve lost –Matthew, Erica and my eyes- they have turned me into a venerable figure. I suppose a near blind art history professor gives off a whiff of the romantic. But nobody at Columbia knows that I lost Violet, too.