But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.