It had been late when Sasha had first read the book. And she had had a couple of glasses of wine. That’s the only excuse Sasha can think of for how she missed it the first time.
Sasha had never told anyone, but she once met Sean Covelli. It was at a bar in Central Square; Sasha was there to see a friend’s band. It was a story SO Sasha. First of all, she had recognized him from a few grainy newspaper photos. At nineteen, when Lia had gone missing, he had been baby-faced, his features soft. But now he was lean and angular, the hair that had been flopping in his face a few years before trimmed short. When he introduced himself as Sean, Sasha just knew. She felt a kinship with him in the way a twenty-year-old woman can with a figure of such tragedy that she has never met. Because she needed a golem for her own feelings that she couldn’t process nor contain.
It has often felt to Sasha that time is like a series of transparent overlays. And when you finish one part of your life you turn the page. But all that does is lay each year on top of the last to bleed through. And no matter where in the world she went, she always ran into someone from a different era of her life there, like the Universe had run out of extras. What were someone she knew from a job in Seattle and someone she went to grade school with in New Hampshire doing as Facebook friends? How did a British friend from college end up in the Whole Foods in Santa Monica? She was convinced she was the only one this ever happened to. Certainly, if she wasn’t, everyone would be talking about it, wouldn’t they?
Present day Sasha wonders if maybe she’s been living in Maine too long; had too much time alone with her own thoughts. But then she remembers that she’s always had thoughts like this, wondering if time was mutable or we were all dead and just living in some afterlife hallucination.
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