The Left AirPod Never Fully Recovers

The left AirPod has been broken for months.

Not completely broken. That would at least be decisive. It works for a while, then the sound fades until I'm listening to music through one ear, like a man being quietly punished for some offense he doesn't remember committing.

I've charged it overnight. Cleaned the little metal contacts with a tissue. Forgotten and reconnected the Bluetooth. Once, I put it back in its case, closed the lid, waited ten seconds, and took it out again with the confidence of someone performing a medical procedure.

Nothing changed. So I learned to live with it, which is not as noble as it sounds. Most mornings I put the AirPods in before leaving the house, start something on Spotify, and walk toward the Metro. The right ear works. The left one contributes intermittently, like an employee who negotiated a permanent four-day week without informing management.

It was 47 degrees this morning, that particular Washington damp-cold that makes you question the usefulness of a suit. At Vienna metro, people stood on the platform staring at their phones, each one sealed inside a small private weather system. I got on the train and thought, not for the first time, about the difference between a person and the memory of a person ..

When someone is in the room, you don't have to do anything. They're just there. You hear the actual voice, not your recollection of it. You see the actual face doing whatever it's doing that day — tired, annoyed, half-listening. Presence doesn't require effort. It's the cheapest thing in the world, until it isn't available anymore.

Then they're gone .. and something strange happens. You don't lose them all at once. You lose them in stages. First it's memory — you can still reach back and touch the real thing, or something close to it. Then memory starts to run low on fuel and imagination takes over, filling in what you can no longer quite retrieve. Then longing, which is what happens when imagination isn't enough either. And somewhere underneath all of it, doing the actual work, is pain, which doesn't announce itself as a stage so much as the floor the other three are standing on.

Here's the part I didn't expect. The person gets bigger as they get further away.

When she was here, she was just a person .. flawed, specific, capable of being annoyed by how I loaded the dishwasher. Once she was gone, she stopped being edited by daily contact. Memory doesn't preserve someone. It curates them. It removes the boring Tuesday and keeps the one good sentence. Give it eighteen years and it will hand you back someone more vivid, more decisive, more present than the actual woman ever managed to be while she was standing in the kitchen.

I've wondered if this is why the dead and the departed both seem to gain influence over us the longer they're gone. Not because they've done anything. Because we've stopped being interrupted by the ordinary parts of them ..

There's a particular thing I noticed only later, which is that I don't always remember her. I remember the version of the world that existed when she was in it .. A Tuesday grocery run. Not because of anything she said in the car, but because that was the year we still did Tuesday grocery runs, and the world had that shape then .. errands with a second person attached to them, a future that assumed continuation. You can be standing in a Safeway deciding whether you need bananas and suddenly find yourself twenty years earlier, not thinking about her exactly, but about a whole climate that no longer exists. The bananas remain indifferent. You buy them anyway.

Maybe that's the actual loss. Not a person-shaped hole. A world-shaped one.

For a long time I lived with one foot in that old world. My present life would be doing something completely ordinary — work, groceries, the Metro, emails that somehow required three replies when one would've done — while another part of my mind kept quietly checking an old map, the way you check a phone that hasn't buzzed.

Then one day she walked away. There was no cinematic weather. No soundtrack. No explanation clean enough to split the story into before and after. There was just a life that had been one thing and then became another. She left .. and her life afterward seemed to move with a kind of efficiency mine never found. New directions. New rooms the world seemed willing to build for her .. I struggled. I discovered that moving forward is not the same thing as wanting to.

Here's what nobody mentioned going in: time doesn't do you the courtesy of freezing the other person while it works on you. It works on both of you, separately, in rooms you can no longer see into. She is not the person I lost. That person doesn't exist anymore, hasn't for years. And I'm not the person she left. Time played a genuinely beautiful cruelty on both of us .. it kept moving after the story ended, as if the story were still owed an ending.

Two people who once felt inseparable become, eventually, two strangers who happen to share a history. The love isn't erased. It's just no longer attached to two people who could recognize each other on sight. It becomes a fact about the past rather than a fact about either of us now .. Which raises a question I've never been able to close. If she has changed, and I have changed, and neither of us is who the other one lost .. then who, exactly, is doing the missing? Am I grieving her, or am I grieving a fixed point that only ever existed in my memory, a woman who stopped updating the day she left while I kept walking? Is the suffering even about a real person anymore, or about the gap between a photograph and the thing the photograph used to depict?

I don't have an answer. I'm not sure the question is answerable, or even entirely honest .. it might just be grief looking for a place to put itself down.

My knee started hurting somewhere in there. My shoulder tightened. I began waking at 4:17 in the morning for no reason I could name, as if some department in my nervous system had decided sleep was no longer a priority. I told myself it was stress. Then age. Eventually both, which isn't a sophisticated diagnosis but has the advantage of requiring no appointment .. And still, occasionally, before dawn, my hand moves across the mattress without asking permission. It finds nothing. The body is embarrassingly literal. It remembers arrangements the mind gave up defending years ago.

Then morning comes. I make coffee. I pack lunch. I check the weather. I put the broken AirPod in my left ear. For a few minutes, nothing comes through it .. Then, unexpectedly, the music returns. Only faintly. I don't adjust anything. I just keep walking toward the station, one ear full and one ear catching whatever it decides to let through, which still, after all this time, is not nothing.