I think about how Grandpa Lou used to spend his days investigating deep-sea collisions between container ships and oil tankers. He once explained to me, using the aid of a fork and knife, how in the open waters a container ship knows it’s about to collide with another container ship about an hour before the collision actually happens, just based on its course. Container ships take so long to turn that, by the time a captain sees another ship appear on the horizon, it’s already too late; all that the crew on board can do is prepare for the collision. He once brought home shortwave radio transcripts from one of the cases he was working on, a chilling conversation between a container ship captain and his mother. The captain called her to tell her that another ship had appeared on the horizon on a collision course with his and that, in an hour’s time, they would hit. His mother was hysterical, but the captain reassured her that he and the crew would survive. He spent a good ten minutes talking to her, speculating on how his career was now over and what a hell the next few months of his life would be, as his boat sailed towards certain destruction.

It occurs to me now that our twenty-eight years together has been this phone call between the captain and his mother. A temporary communion as our two bodies glide on their intractable paths towards oblivion.

My body is a horror.

This hits me with the force of a log truck flipping and smacking down against a stretch of deserted highway — something you and I saw at a distance once, safe from the loosed logs crashing down the adjacent slope. And like that truck this realization releases a tumbling, terrible cargo. My body is a horror.

I don’t mean my body’s appearance. I’m not ashamed of my body, despite the brief jolts of self-hatred that pulse through me as I pass by reflective surfaces — car windows, darkened storefronts — and catch sight of my simian posture, my neck craned forward from hours of laptop and smartphone usage. In overcompensation I wrench my neck and shoulders back, further than necessary, as both punishment and corrective. But no, I’m not ashamed of my body.