Sep 5, 2018 · 9 min read
From time to time, I’m stunned by a fragment of text. It happens like this: I bite my lip, tilt my head back, and just breathe for a few seconds. If it’s funny, I tend to cackle. It’s involuntary. If that sounds ridiculous to you, imagine how it looks to the iPad operator seated across from me. There’s an absurdity to this whole thing, a paradoxical moment of intense human connection to a handful of words rather than the living person three feet away.
These fragments tend to have two things in common. First, they describe things I’ve already felt in ways I’ve never thought of (“bleak but beautiful, like light through ice”). Second, they’re often…

