The irony is, as a young boy I had been preoccupied with my soul. Specifically with trying to find the secret compartment in my body where it was hidden. I read all about Dr. Duncan MacDougall’s experiments at the turn of the century in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in which he weighed six patients in the moment of their deaths, hoping to catch the shift in mass that would occur as their souls departed their bodies. He placed each patient’s bed on a massive scale and recorded that, on average, each patient appeared to be twenty-one grams lighter after death than when they were alive. I used to close my eyes and try to locate these twenty-one grams inside of me. At first I was searching for heat. I would run my hands slowly over my body looking for any discrepancies. Sometime later I came to believe that my soul was not warmth but a colour, and mine was blue. I can’t really say why I was so certain of this, but I began looking for evidence of my blue soul not within my body but in the world around me. The way the blue of the sky would linger in my eyes long after I’d closed them: this was proof. The way I tasted the colour blue when I dove into a swimming pool: this was proof. The way even the word “blue” would puncture me anytime I heard someone sing it on the radio, or how the word would leap out at me in a book as if wanting me to claim it. Like Horace-Bénédict de Saussure trying to measure the tint of the sky with his cyanometer, I tried to gauge the purity my soul on any given day by the shade of blue that appeared to me.

If I think back far enough, it seems this preoccupation began around the time I was five, after an incident in the showroom of a housing supply store. The aisle was displaying bathtubs. Everything was white and gleaming. I remember walking through an aisle of tightly packed tubs and feeling shocked to see them clustered together so ignobly. Something about it felt obscene to me, like a room of disembodied orifices. Mouths, ears, vaginas. Bathtubs disembodied from bathrooms, disembodied from homes; they were terrible. I’m sure my blood-sugar was just low. Either way, for some reason I lay down on the floor and wouldn’t get up. I spun around on my back. You were shouting at me. Then begging. There were tears in our eyes. You later told me a woman walked past with her husband and muttered, “Some women just shouldn’t be mothers.” I worked myself into such a frenzy that I passed out. Or perhaps I hit my head. I’m still not clear what happened. I just remember being outside my body for a moment, looking down at myself on the ground.