During these last two weeks of the year, I read two books about absence. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities summarizes the past two years I spent traveling the world only in my imagination and, more recently, fantasizing how to invent the impossible by way of my imagination. As I read, I noted what turned out to be one of the most frequently quoted passages in the text, so instead I’ll share a different one:

‘Phyllis is a space in which routes are drawn between points suspended in the void: the shortest way to reach that certain merchant’s tent, avoiding that certain creditor’s window. Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased’ (p. 91).

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart was recommended to me by a friend. I don’t usually read memoirs, but I was drawn to the subject of grief and losing parts of one’s identity along with the loss of a loved one. I tore through this book but was snagged early on by the way Zauner described what it feels like to grieve:

‘Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors… There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again” (p. 6).

Transitioning out of one year and going into another feels a lot like stepping into an imaginary space. It’s a form of letting go as the calendar commits to the next numerical label in the sequence, and we all follow its lead without protest. In my imagination, there is protest. We will move forward but will continue to look back as our memories and imaginations intermingle, giving way to the impossible.

Here’s to a new year and to letting both holding on and letting go happen.