The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman

What bothered me wasn't so much the disappearance itself, since I had scarcely known her, or even the possible ugliness of that disappearance, but my own failure of memory.

--from Steven Millhauser's "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman"

I wanted to see if there was more of Ian McEwan in the library. There wasn't. Instead I picked up Steven Millhauser. 

I like his sentences. Particularly: "One night I dreamed that I was playing basketball with Elaine Coleman. The driveway was also the beach, the ball kept splashing in shallow water, but Elaine Coleman was laughing, her face was radiant though somehow hidden, and when I woke I felt that the great failure in my life was never to have evoked that laughter" (Millhauser, 33). 

Made me think about dreams that I wake up from, not because they're bad dreams but because of some invention called an alarm clock. And so you wish you could hold on to that dream, to hear someone laugh again, or to make him laugh, but you're already awake.