{"product_id":"me-without-him-an-ablative-mood","title":"Me Without Him: an ablative mood","description":"Grief, Henry discovers, has excellent taste in real estate.\nHost 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.\nThe 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?\u003cbr\u003eASIN: B0HFVH9JXW\u003cbr\u003eVSKU: BVV.B0HFVH9JXW.VG\u003cbr\u003eCondition: Very Good\u003cbr\u003eAuthor\/Artist:Roark, Henry 磊磊\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNote:\u003c\/b\u003e Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition Notes\u003c\/b\u003e: Book has little sign of wear or use  \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Blue Vase Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44492442107965,"sku":"BVV.B0HFVH9JXW.VG","price":14.79,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0589\/4225\/9261\/files\/B0HFVH9JXW-0.jpg?v=1794086204","url":"https:\/\/www.bluevasebooks.com\/products\/me-without-him-an-ablative-mood","provider":"Blue Vase Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}