Unfair Contest

My friend Abbi – previously featured on this blog, though not by name, here and here – is in the hospital, and for the past week or so, I've thought of little else. I told her I lost 3 lbs in 3 days, and she said, "Hey, I've lost about 25 the past few months 😅" I said this is an unfair contest.

There's a passage in The Great Gatsby which makes me think of her. In the book, the narrator is talking about Gatsby's smile, but in Abbi's case I'm thinking about her conversation and personality.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. … It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

I don't know if other people who know her feel this way, but I really do.

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Blog note: Many of the blogs that were on my blogroll are no longer active: some have merely gone quiet, while others have been made private or disappeared altogether. I moved the inactive links to the sidebar of my CQA page. I didn't want to remove them altogether because it's nice to have this record – a bittersweet reminder of a time when blogging was more of a community activity.