“The farther away I go,” Alex wrote, “the closer I’ll be to you.”

A week later, she lay dead on the floor of a middle school bathroom in Thailand. That was three years after she had shown up late for dinner with a black eye from her first seizure. It was eight years after our first date climbing trees in Central Park.

“That breeze, that tickled your ear?” she wrote once, when there was just an ocean between us. “That was me.”

Her final letter ended with a question. “How long until we see each other again?”

It was the night of her funeral when it happened. She was there, waiting on the far bank of a raging river, radiant with red hair flying. I began to wade across, but the black current swept me away before I could reach her. She came again another night, as I slept, trapped behind thick glass we pressed our palms against. Then, another dream—this time of Alex in a hospital waiting room. “It isn’t her,” the nurse insisted, summoning security. Unable to contemplate nothingness, the mind can […]