Me Without Him: an ablative mood

Grief, Henry discovers, has excellent taste in real estate. Host opens the collection as fiction: an architect with mild face-blindness pays an underground practitioner to surgically remove the neurological imprint his ex-fiancé left behind—and learns love doesn’t extract cleanly. The essays that follow flow upstream from fiction to its source. A face-blind writer mistakes strangers for the man who left, and then one another. He proposes with a ring made of salvaged koa wood. Years later, he buys another, loses it shortly after, and then deliberates; he wears it anyway. Tracing a three-year pandemic relationship through Al-Anon meetings, an eighteenth-century paradox about why the night sky is dark, and NASA’s thirteen-year mission to Saturn—磊磊 Roark looks for a language tense precise enough to pin down a loss that still stirs without any regard to boundaries. In between: a mind that runs hot and dark on its own schedule, a healthcare system that punishes anyone who needs it twice, and a retreat into faith that asks what’s left to choose when choices run out. Me Without Him takes its name from the ablative—a grammatical case used here as a mood from separation, of being taken from. Nine pieces ask the same question from nine angles: how do you tell the wound scar from the person who caused it, once they’ve bloomed into the same shape?
ASIN: B0HFVH9JXW
VSKU: BVV.B0HFVH9JXW.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Roark, Henry 磊磊
Binding: Paperback
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Book has little sign of wear or use