My worst nightmare is to be a person with my body tangled everywhere. Superseded only by the nightmare of seeing a loved one, seeing you, still alive, still person, with your body tangled everywhere. Or worse still: to see you see your own body tangled everywhere. Seeing you witness the terror of your own body/person rupture. To see you still alive, conscious, blinking, gasping, beholding your own corpse like in an American horror movie. That is, in fact, my worst nightmare.

Standing here I feel myself gripped by what Kristeva called “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness.” What distinguishes the living thing I am from the living thing you once were? In this moment you are neither subject nor object. You are in an unknowable space. An abject space, insofar as it pulls us towards a place where meaning deteriorates. You are “familiar as [you] might have been in an opaque and forgotten life,” a life we shared as recently as a second ago, but now “radically separate, loathsome… A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.”

I realize I have spent my life trying to excavate the difference between those things that are and those things that are not. As a child I watched cartoons with talking cars, houses with faces that blinked and smiled, trees that waved; and of course I saw them do this in real life as well. I saw the faces in everything. The screaming mouth in a bisected bell pepper. The serpent in the stick. I felt pangs for the pumpkin smashed on the pavement after Halloween and invested in the rich interior worlds of stuffed animals. I once shivered when I saw the giant arthropod eye of a spider staring back at me in the dozens of small clustered bubbles of my piss in the toilet water.