I know you must be one or the other; that you are caught between these states is only my perception. And I know that it’s impossible to know for certain, until I take the three steps towards the bed and touch your hand; until I place my ear to your lips and you startle awake, your head retreating into the pillow. Until I laugh and say, “I thought you were dead.” “Dead?” “You looked dead.” “What are you doing in my room?” “I’m sorry for waking you up. How’re you feeling?” “What time is it?” “Eleven.” “Are you serious?” And so on.

That you’re asleep is definitely the more probable of the two possibilities. After all, every other time I’ve walked in on you in bed you’ve been alive, breathing, sleeping, dreaming, or sitting up reading, on the phone, crying, clipping your nails, or just lost in thought. Every other moment in my entire life you’ve been alive, an infinite number of living moments, why should this one be the exception? Eleven in the morning is not an hour for death. Death isn’t a quiet thing to be happened upon like a bit of cat puke on the rug.

And yet something is different. It’s undeniable. There is something about the room, the quality of the stillness, its breathlessness, the shape of your body, your face, the way it falls, that fills me with a terrible uncertainty. Is this death? Is this is what death looks like? Perhaps this is what death looks like in the light of late morning through beige curtains. What death looks like in the folds of your comforter, the wallpaper, the Moroccan rug, the wicker laundry hamper, your half-opened closet, the stack of historical novels on the floor, a copy of National Geographic on your bedside table, the Ikea floor lamp and its plastic shade. The absence of your life in every texture. The lack of that subtle scent, almost a warmth, of a sleeping body’s breath in the room, a night’s worth of exhalation.

As it comes into focus, your body is a thousand contradictions: the surest force I know and yet somehow almost immaterial; your face a kind of terrible death mask and yet beatific like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia; the edges of your mouth tracing a smile and somehow a frown at the same time; your body weightless and yet leaden; suffused with light and yet dark.