The Adhesive Friction that Makes an Individual Possible"

They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written.  Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible.  It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence.  It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff.  But there were a thousand high times the members experience, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows.  They laughed loud and often.  They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves.

[...]

Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist.  There it was, the watch. He said this gravely.  There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, a rift in his field of vision, and it took him some time to make the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal.

--Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)