Standing here in the doorway I understand why in theatre an unintentional laugh by an actor is called corpsing. In this moment, something epic inside me wants to be released, epic on the scale of a dam-burst, pain and relief, a sigh cancelling out a sob, a smile cancelling out a scream, leaving me with a laugh. What would it mean for me to laugh the second after finding your body? Your corpse. Corpse. Why can’t I understand this word? Why can’t I compute it, as would always irritate you to hear someone say. Since I was a child I’ve known that our bodies are on loan from the earth. I know that we’re biology. Standing here I consider the possibility of your corpse. The very distinct possibility that in the minutes to follow the blood will settle in the lower part of your body and a purple stain will appear along your underside. That the top part of your body will turn ashen and waxy, and once your cells have expelled the last of their oxygen they will begin to die, one by one, your brain cells first, within minutes, then your skin cells over the next twenty-four hours. That lactic acid and myosin will induce rigor mortis, turning your limbs blue and your hands into sculpture, into claws, while your gut flora starts to eat through your intestinal wall, causing a festering green blister to appear on your pelvis as other bacteria begin spreading out from your stomach, down your thighs, and across your chest, putrefying your body, off-gassing methane and hydrogen sulphide and pushing your intestines out through your rectum while fluid from your lungs oozes from your mouth and nostrils, until every element that once constituted you returns to the earth to make countless other human and non-human forms before being pounded into the firmament by an asteroid and coalesced into dust clouds and new stars.

I understand this. I understand decay. The physical processes. If you are dead, I understand it was most likely a stroke while you slept. The blockage of a blood vessel no bigger than the tip of a sharpened pencil. What I can’t understand is you cleaved from your body. How exactly does that happen? What is released, shorn, sublimated? I feel as if I could stand in this doorway for days as your body overflows like Archimedes’ bath, until I eventually resign myself to never understanding, until all I could say for certain is that, in death, you became past-tense, and that perhaps the change you underwent is really as imperceptible and ephemeral as a grammatical shift.