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.

And then, I am holding you.