When was this bled from me, this ambiguity of being? At what point did this sense of wonder turn into a sense of horror? I don’t remember being terrorized by this ineffable threshold between the living and the un-living as a child. Where did that repulsion come from? It seems remarkable that I shouldn’t have really noticed that profound reorientation until long after it was complete. I suspect this is not an innate evolution but rather a learned one; an acquired binary that, at its darkest core, seeks to deny sentience even to those living things that clearly have it, to all things that are not human. Inhuman. I think back to our conversation in the Dollarama and begin to think my questions — When does a computer acquire sentience? When do computers become beings? — were indeed the wrong questions. As I stand here I wonder: How are you a being any more than a computer or a robot or a rabbit or a stick insect or an almond tree? How have we defined this threshold? Between that which gets to be and that which does not, in our perception.

After our road trip to Burning Man I went up to Ottawa to visit you for your birthday, sunburned and nursing a cold sore courtesy of Ana borrowing my toothbrush. We decided to see an exhibition featuring the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Toronto-based photographer who had built an international reputation for capturing images of large-scale ecological devastation wrought by humans: blackened shores in Bangladesh where discontinued oil tankers are dismantled for parts; an undulating sea of discarded tires in California; an iridescent red river of tailings from nickel mining in northern Ontario; the fractal patterns of polluted estuaries as seen from a plane, like brain stems. We strolled through the gallery in silence, in opposite directions, so as not to rush or irritate one another with our inane comments. We reconnected at an image of innumerable workers in pink uniforms on an assembly-line floor in a fluorescent-lit chicken processing plant in Dehui City, China. The symmetry and scale of the photograph were arresting, even as the depiction of dehumanized labour was unnerving.