The offices and factories and pizzerias we work in are bodies we enter and become part of every day. Perhaps this is why working in these spaces so keenly reminds us of our mortality: we experience them as becoming-body. We are confronted with the ease with which our persons are erased and we become just our bodies doing menial labour, or part of a collective body of employees. The ease with which this cleaving of person and body occurs is unnerving. The ease with which a group of people can stand up and begin singing an anthem together, the ease with which I could enter a Tim Hortons, a huge, composite body working like a hive to hawk donuts and coffee to passing cars eighteen seconds at a time. We cannot be fixed, stable, and singular entities if this is possible. We cannot always call ourselves people if this is possible. This was the becoming-body terror I had when forced to stand and sing hymns in church, the horrifying sensation of becoming part of a giant composite body, a body without consequence, a corps, along with every other congregant. In those instances, I was no more than a bacterium in a gut.

In this moment, the boundary between your body, the sheets, the bed, the room, even my body begins to feel unclear, just so many clouds of molecularly bonded matter with mostly nothing in between, just air, just absence, just the suggestion of forms. I suddenly feel so porous as to be a part of every other body that has ever lived, breathing in particles off-gassed by others, airborne specks of other animals’ shit, a body sustained by their flesh, their fluids, a body made of elements from distant stars, particles recycled countless times through the earth. To think that I was once literally inside of you. Spawn. A tadpole swimming in your stomach. The living thing you were, forging the living thing I am. When I did not distinguish my self from you or the world, when sensation was boundless, when life was nothing but the pure materiality of existence. And then I was born. Made visible. When we were separated and I recognized for the first time a boundary between “me” and the other, between “me” and you. Mother.

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“What would you do if I was dead?”

I half-expect you to open your eyes, turn your head on your pillow, and ask me this before cracking a smile. Then breaking into a laugh. And standing here in the doorway I would begin laughing too, tears collecting in our eyes as we recalled how many times I’d tormented you with this little game over the years. The game always began just like that: a what-would-you-do-if question posed out of the blue. Except I was always the asker and you the dutiful respondent.

“What would you do if I was hit by a car?”