I say since then everything went out the window, everything collapsed, as my friend Pico would say. A horror that was only eased with each falling in love. A horror in which I took pleasure. A horror always saved by friendship or by some intensification of the body.

And well, everything else, including everything about my marriage, you already know.

It’s my sentimental education, I conclude, and we both laugh as we finish off the first bottle of wine.

I drink less, but I still feel tipsy, a pleasure rises from my knees and relaxes everything, including the fetus.

And you? I ask. Tell me something.

He opens the second bottle and tells me:

I remember, he says, asking my father, one night when he was lying on one of the living room couches, before bed, what death was, and he calmly told me it must be like a nap, that I shouldn’t worry too much about it. It wasn’t a very philosophical answer, but I imagine that for my eight- or nine-year-old self it would’ve been enough. I slowly abandoned my idea of wanting to be a skillet or a piece of plastic, given that back then I was running around with the certainty that they could never die, even if they could be transformed. But even that was better than completely disappearing, which is what I assumed death was. I imagine thinking about a nap temporarily alleviated me. This is one of the few memories I’ve recovered from my childhood, I believe it was from the insufficiency of that answer that my philosophical interest emerged. Now I’m writing a thesis about the disappearance of matter.

He takes another sip of wine and falls quiet. But I keep asking questions about his thesis and his life and he tells me other childhood anecdotes. He tells me his mother was deaf and that, as a child, this caused an infinite sadness that was also anger. His mother couldn’t hear him. I think about how all children are hurt by life; about the ways it will necessarily hurt mine.

And thus our bodies are covered by the night, by a halo of intimacy, in the middle of which we both fall asleep: he, drunk, me, with a nausea that wakes me up every now and then and makes me run for ice cubes to put in my mouth.