If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

Khaled Hosseini's new book is called And the Mountains Echoed.  And so far I like it very much.  I have a somewhat proprietary feeling about Hosseini, as though he is my own.  (I suppose I share that feeling with hundreds of thousands of other people, which I resent.)  I grow possessive of writers I think of as mine.  And their books.  Possessive but simultaneously wanting to share, perhaps like a drug dealer who wants to be paid for getting you hooked, or maybe more like an artist who wants you to love his work but not to steal it and sell it as your own.

I miss you.  It is an uncomfortable feeling, one which expands and contracts beneath my rib cage.  It gives me ghost pains in the place you used to be.



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