As I lay there, feeling our two skeletons side by side, I tried to imagine the Britain that lay in wait for us. Unlike Osama, I still held out hope. Like an infatuated lover, I knew I would continue to love the country in spite of itself, even when it lashed out and pushed me away. I would find new compartments in its heart to be delighted and disappointed by, just like I would find new compartments in Osama’s. Together I imagined we would still live in a London of hidden canals lined with boldly painted houseboats, Victorian row houses, and mid-century council flats, markets of vendors selling cassava and flatbread. A London of squalor and grandeur. A London where I would live with Osama’s brown eyes that were sometimes green in the morning as we drank our coffee black and listened to the BBC.

On our first date, at the Lahore Kebab, I had given him the postcard from the Tate and he had stuck it to his fridge. Which was now our fridge. I saw that postcard so many times that it was invisible to me now. I thought of the whole world and the work left to be done. I thought of him and me, living in the world. “Just you and me, kid,” he’d say sometimes, grabbing hold of my hand. And a new variation of the postcard occurred to me.

the whole world + you and me = the whole world

Augustine spent a lifetime asking, “What is my body?” and came up with the answer “a vessel of sin.” He could only reconcile himself with being-body by distancing himself from it, denying it, vilifying his urges, thinking his way out of it, and in so doing shaped the Western body for the next two thousand years. Augustine believed he could free his body through self-denial. And in this moment I realize I’ve arrived at the precise opposite conclusion. Freedom through a total embrace of corporeality. Sensation. Every sensation. Through the loving of countless bodies and the discreet joys of profoundly loving one. In knowing him completely. And in knowing myself through him completely. In hurling myself headlong into the unknown abyss of love. And hurling myself headlong into the unknown abyss of myself. Headlong into the abyss between being and nothingness, object and subject, thing and nothing.

“The abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence,” Kristeva wrote.