At the time I was too shaken by the blood from your nose and your grazed knees to consider what you’d just said. That fucking car almost hit us. As I recall the moment now, what fascinates me is that you imbued the car with a sentience. Or rather, the sentience of the car and the driver became one. Just as it was a single body in our perceived reality of it, moving through the world, almost fucking hitting us. All manner of bodies without people can be imbued with sentience: cars, houses, laptops, wasp’s nests. When I walk through the wrecking yard of busted cars near the strip mall, I see corpses, rusted and spent bodies once inhabited by persons but now too old to function. “That wasp’s nest is humming,” you said, when we found it in the garage last summer, imbuing the body of the nest with the sentience of the wasps inside. The wasp’s nest was a body we had to contend with and exterminate. After the fumigation, I saw the emptied and withered nest in the garage as a corpse too.

And like the wasps, we also animate the lifeless things we enter and inhabit. When I stand in a room I become a body with that room; it is a physical structure which houses a person inside of it, just as my body is a physical structure which houses a person inside of it. The room becomes alive with me. With us. “This room is too loud,” we shout at a party. And it seems the distinction between our bodies and architecture is only growing less clear with time. A body on life-support is a body made up of itself and the life-sustaining medical infrastructure of the room. There are rooms I walk into now that sense my presence. They beep, they activate lights, they begin to record, to witness, to dispense information to me, to alter their temperature to suit my body, to play music, to activate appliances, fire, water, air; these rooms change their state to suit mine. Perhaps one day I won’t even be able to tell where my body begins and the room I’m standing in ends. Like your hand holding the water glass.