You show me another way. You show me myself. You fortify me. I refuse Augustine’s shame. His original sin. His denial of body. And I refuse to let my father’s shadow darken mine, and its urges and desires and any pleasure it brings me will be a gift, a corrective, a testament to you, and of course to me, for I celebrate myself and sing myself in Whitmanesque reverie, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

XIV

XIV

11:04 a.m. January 21, 2017.

Here we are. Me in the doorway. You in bed. Caught somewhere between your self and your body, between being and non-ness. Caught in this transverberation, in what Heidegger called “the moment of vision”: Augenblick, the “glance of the eye” in which a vision of being is revealed, a vision of being that is time, past, present, and future unified. Your eyes closed, lips apart, the window a dim rectangle bisected by a brilliant white strip of light where the two curtains almost touch, the light-beam strikes the half-glass of water on your bedside table, illuminating a faint lipstick mark on its rim. The glass sits beside the digital clock, your cast-off earrings, a cap-less black pen, a magazine opened and folded over to an article you were intending to finish, all these objects suspended with us in this moment.

The light filtering through the window, through the particulate suspended, the dead skin, clothing fibre, cat dander, is an unmistakably northern light, a raking light, the crisp and chastening light of this latitude which lays everything bare, a light as familiar to anyone living above the forty-fifth parallel as their mother’s voice, a light Vermeer discovered could not be captured without the aid of a camera, a light that suggests no shadows are possible and yet, when examining a photograph, one realizes the shadows are everywhere, pulling their weight. How would our lives have been different had we lived under a calmer and diffuse light, a southern light? How would we have known each other differently surrounded by new shadows?

Suspended with us are dozens of unconscious sounds, sounds which will be framed out of my memory of this moment almost instantly: the hum of the furnace in the basement, which I always thought lent the house a kind of breath; the muffled drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen; the high-pitched frequencies of — what, what is that, like the cross on the motel lawn, some kind of appliance somewhere, the Internet router? The lights? The high-pitched dog frequencies I’m only ever aware of when the power cuts out and I notice their absence.