Sarah Jaffe

You just got to do that.

And you can't pause the line so that you can cry.

And you can maybe cry while you're attaching the steering wheels, but you might screw it up.

So you probably don't want to do that.

And also, you probably don't want everybody to watch you while you cry while you try to attach a steering wheel on the assembly line while the cars are going by you, you know.

That middle voice, it was from a piece that was sent to me by the author Namwale Serpell, who wrote this beautiful book, The Furrows, about grief.

It's a novel.

It's incredible.

And the piece that talked about was talking about the concept of drift.

And I interviewed Namwali Serpell for a book forum and we were talking about grief.

And it made me think about a lot of things that aren't work in that way.

They aren't sort of volitional in that same way.

But like, I also think that love is kind of like this.

It happens in the middle voice.

You know, I would sort of think like I have to be actively doing things all the time.

And one of the things that grief sort of taught me is that I don't become unlovable because I need things for a while from people.

And I'm not always capable of immediately reciprocating.

Like when my father died, the people who knew what to say and what to do were people who had lost a parent.

And they reached out to me and were like, I heard your father died.

I'm sorry.