“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

JORGE LUIS BORGES

ONE LONG GOODBYE

She’s in love with an #illusive dead man.

Wait. No. That’s not it.

She’s in love with the mind of a dead man.

And she’s happy he’s dead.

If that man were alive today, she might get into trouble.

He’d be almost a hundred and forty; not sure how much fun that’d be for him either.

But he’s sleeping ‘the big sleep.’

So it’s all right to be in love with his extraordinary mind.

Completely safe.

She doesn’t believe in ghosts, of course.

There is no ghost of him.

Just his #orphic words, lingering in her mind, mesmerizing still, nearly seventy years after he was claimed by death.

She picks one of the dead man’s books and wonders: What if Borges was right?

She feels he was, mocks herself for believing the illusion, puts the book down.

ONE. LONG. GOODBYE.

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© 2026 CE 

Pic: Canva

Raymond Chandler died on March 26, 1959.