What I’m going to miss were those silky exits from the back seat of an Uber, the air that went limp as a sigh when she decanted and entered the pulse of a neighborhood, its movement abruptly still as strangers retained their breaths long enough to savor her arrival, reorientate their coordinates, while she walked along nonplussed by her ability to alter the magnetic field of an entire half-city block. What I am not going to miss are echoes from an extinct world, ghostly residues of a vanished respondent, the ease with which beautiful women move on without us.
Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University of Vermont.