A review by samantha
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

5.0

"I was driving away from it all when a radio broadcast came on and an astronaut mid-mission began to read a letter to his son. It was a bunch of nothing — plain declarations of love and unoriginal philosophizing — but a shaking fit overtook me, and I had to pull off the road. Who knows what it was? Those same gray mountains through the windshield, or the thinness of the clouds. My father would have liked to be that man, I knew — he'd fancied himself some kind of pioneer — and maybe I would have liked to be the son of someone who had ventured and succeeded. Or maybe it was just the direct address coming through the speakers at me, all the way from space. The expanse made him totally unfettered. The distance stripped his words. There was no self-consciousness, only sentiment: I'm out here, and I'm thinking of you."