Moving beyond this room, this glance includes Chloe, ancient and wizened, perched on the back of the sofa in the living room downstairs. Her little fountain-like water dish lapping in the corner, specially installed for her because she only drinks moving water. How long will it take for her to realize you’re gone? I can just see her now, her brown sausage body and delicate little paws, mincing about with great, indeterminate purpose. And in this glance Al, an anxious golden Lab with a human face, rummages around the backyard for smells. He always reminded you of a mugging comic from the silent film era, wearing each expression a bit too broadly. In this glance are the chairs in the dining room, wearing our winter coats on their rounded backs like the furs of fancy ladies at a gala. And the slick of oil shimmering silver and purple in the puddle under the car, like fish scales. In this glance is the front yard, the street, the wind passing through our naked poplar tree. How does this sound so much like a river? And what is wind and how have I grown so old without knowing? The sun acknowledges every fold in the snow. Every dormant swimming pool on the street lies still and quiet, looking into the sky. Like all of the other underused things in the neighbourhood, these pools wait with patience to be acknowledged.

In this glance Ana is on her way to meet me at Rockcliffe Park, where we will walk past the prime minister’s house and the police barricades once more, this time to march against Trump along with the thousands of other women and children and men riding buses and driving cars downtown, amassing on street corners and in cafés, ready to converge on Parliament Hill. And Clyde in his Kurdish wool cap, walking through the forest of blue spruce surrounding his house, where he lives with the ghost of love. “If I die before you, I’ll be sure to save you a spot in the queue,” Wole once joked, kissing his forehead. In this glance Will is weaving in and out of traffic on his bike on his way to work, his long hair a majestic, spastic spectacle in the wind; and Gia is in her apartment on her exercise bike, swigging a plastic litre of Diet Pepsi and listening to Verdi’s Aida; and Osama, across an ocean filled with mountain ranges never touched by light, he’s buried in a thick book in the library, buried in letters that have been arranged to draw pictures in his mind. Here we are in the sublime, in the unveiled awe and the terror of it, a network of conscious agents, standing in Osama’s equation, a sprawling network of perceiving, and I am not afraid, I am held here in the void by a constellation of bodies that have known my body, the constellation of people my person belongs to, and all of the love I have given and taken and taken for granted, and death now suddenly feels of no concern to me, just as the rain doesn’t concern the dead, just as my standing here doesn’t concern the rain, and I feel an ecstasy break over me, like the orgasmic cascade of water hitting a model’s back in a shampoo commercial, a sensation in equal parts intoxicating and embarrassing as it suggests eureka, as it suggests transcendence, which my sardonic crossed-armed millennial lizard brain immediately distrusts, immediately mocks, and yet it is insistent and unambiguous revelation, insistent and unambiguous joy, rapturous and rupturing joy, seismic joy, unbounded and arrant, shouting quivering leaping joy, ballistic and blooming joy, defenestrating joy, unequivocal unqualified ya ya ya joy, mirth, is there a stronger word? Elation. Is there a stronger word? Luminescent. Incandescent. Are there words? There is nothing to be afraid of. Death does not frighten me.