Even so, we don’t know everything about each other. We don’t know what we were like as healthy people. We don’t know what differences lie between our current selves and the people we were before getting sick — what maturation and emotional hardening have occurred during that transformation. Most fundamentally, we don’t know what it’s like to have a vocal conversation with each other. My text messages were inadequate, and I thought about using hand signals, but the heart-shaped hand gesture felt far too clichéd.

Source: New York Times May 25, 2018 03:56 UTC