The night before I lost everything was like any other night.
Anna and I kept each other awake very late. We laughed. Young sis-
ters in a bed under the roof of their childhood home. Wind on the
window.
How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?
I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives.
The spaces between our words grew.
It became difficult to tell when we were talking and when we were
silent.
The hairs of our arms touched.
It was late, and we were tired.
We assumed there would be other nights.
Anna’s breathing started to slow, but I still wanted to talk.
She rolled onto her side.
I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, You can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always necessary.
The books in my father’s shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna’s breathing.
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It’s always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma
-excerpt from the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
