By “being outside my body,” I mean my being, my person, was outside of my body, sort of adjacent to it and slightly above, looking down. From about the height of a player’s viewpoint over their avatar in a video game. I remember my eyes were still open and looking up into the fluorescence of the showroom ceiling. But if my body’s eyes were pointed upwards, how was I looking down at my body in this moment? I remember my mouth was open and you grabbed my head and it lolled from side to side. And then, a moment later, I felt the cold tile against my back again; I blinked and the fluorescence was in my eyes, and I could feel your hands on the back of my head, and I could feel the hoarseness in my throat and the heaviness in my heart, and I was back. My person and body were one again.

In those days, you and I used to play a game called Teletransporter, in which I would stand still and close my eyes, and you would throw a blanket over me. As the blanket enclosed me, I would dematerialize and be sucked through the wormhole of your embrace, re-materializing on the other side of our finished basement in a shriek of laugher. I wanted to de- and re-materialize over and over, as long as your arms could bear it. The most thrilling part was always the moment right before the dematerialization, when you threw the blanket up above my head and I could feel it suspended in midair the split second before it landed on me, heavy, coating my body in dark matter, erasing me. Almost as glorious was the moment that followed this, when I didn’t exist and was being carried in your arms through nothingness, through the space-time of un-being, spun around so as to erase the geography of the basement from my memory, feeling the struggle of my weight in your arms, their quiver, the effort of your love, your submission to our fantasy. There was always a slight deflation when you pulled off the blanket like a magician revealing the wonder of still being alive, the magic of my still being me. My body, the world — these were always somehow a slight disappointment, a minor key to the major key of the nothingness where I had just been.