This city, this suburb, this house, this bedroom, your body, a nesting doll of containers for your self, containers that will long outlive your self, just as your body will continue to be a container in death, sustaining the flora in your gut and the bacteria on your skin, under your nails, millions of other bodies still carrying on with their lives like squatters in an abandoned city.

It seems the shape and texture of your body has already changed, though in ways too subtle to even articulate. Perhaps I’m just projecting my incomprehension onto your body and causing it to refract in new and unfamiliar ways. And there are other things I can’t comprehend. The colour of the walls, which I know are white but look blue in this light and yellow in others and even grey and black for long stretches of the evening and night. Just as I can’t comprehend the laughter from our neighbour’s house, or the sounds of snowblowers and barking dogs and the highway in the distance. How can life continue unaware?

As I stand here in the doorway everything is laid bare, unveiled, in a terrifying and indecipherable nakedness — your life, my life, the lives of my friends and lovers, fragments, conversations, starlings, drones, dreams, a desert, a beach at night, a Paris subway tunnel, the World Trade Center towers falling, a torrential rain, a cloud of monarch butterflies, The Last Judgement, a wasp’s nest, a Nina Simone song, a waterfall plunging into a cave. I feel my entire life traced like a celestial connect-the-dots back to your body, both asleep and dead. A grand narrative of bodies and objects and how the precarious distinction between the two, between living and un-living, has defined my life. In this moment I am all the bodies through which I’ve known my body and all the people through which I’ve known my person. In this moment we are a constellation.

IV

IV

The first time you met Ana, she fell through the glass table in our living room. Somehow I’d managed to convince you to host the cast party for the Henry Munro Middle School production of The Hobbit, personally adapted by our homeroom teacher, Ms. Duchovny. As you pulled Ana up off the shard-strewn carpet, you noticed she was still in her character makeup. The thick green suppurations of Troll #2. You were not amused: “Go upstairs and wash your face.”