I am looking at your body but you are not there. Here again I say looking, the ever-favoured sense, when really this is something more visceral and intuitive than the apprehending of an image. I am with your body but not with you, and I suddenly know this in the way flesh recognizes itself in another’s flesh, its life and its death in another’s life or death. The way my heart pounded as I stumbled upon the corpse of a cat at the edge of a grocery store parking lot in high school, a full two seconds before my mind even understood what it was I was looking at. The body always leads and the mind follows on its leash. The steel chamber is open. The cat is dead. Accept it. Understand it. But what does it mean for me to feel the absence of “you”? And when are “you” really an absence? Eubulides of Miletus once proposed a paradox in which there was a large heap of sand, and from this heap one grain was individually removed. The heap began with a million grains of sand, and then become a heap of 999,999 grains of sand, and then a heap of 999,998 grains of sand, and so on until the heap was comprised of only one grain of sand. But if a single grain of sand can be a heap, then through modus ponens removing that final grain of sand must still leave a heap, and thus a heap can be comprised of even a negative number of grains. A heap can exist in the absence of a heap. So when are you an absence? When are you no longer a heap of sand? If each grain of sand were a functioning neuron. A cell in your body. Can you, like the heap of sand, exist in the absence of yourself?

From where I stand, I notice the book at the top of the small pile of historical novels on your bedroom floor. It’s called The Girl King. The cover photograph, of a young woman in a sumptuous dress, appears to be from a television miniseries adaptation.

“Are you enjoying it?” I asked, when I saw you reading it at breakfast yesterday.

“It’s not bad,” you replied, without looking up from the page. “It’s about Queen Christina of Sweden.”