When I left the doctor’s office on Lexington Avenue, I was shaking. I felt unsteady, as though I were walking on sponges. I couldn’t believe how people were just ambling along looking at their phones as though everything was as it had been when I first woke up that morning. Later, I realized that everyone was acting normally because, like me before, they felt wholeheartedly that they were not dying.

When I arrived home from the clinic, I dropped my keys in the Wedgwood bowl. It sounded the same, the clatter of metal on porcelain, yet everything was different. They were no longer the same keys and it was another dish reconstructed from my memory of the one I had seen that morning. It felt like a different apartment, too, one I was visiting for the first time, but based on one I had lived in before.

Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life.

I wanted to cry fiercely then, wring the shock from my body so I might begin to think clearly. But I couldn’t. It was because I didn’t believe it yet.

So, I fed the plants with a copper watering can my wife and I bought in Paris after I published my first short story in a small but relevant magazine. The handle felt cold in my hand. Was that normal? Would it have felt so cold if I wasn’t dying? Was I sick on top of being terminally ill?

Ironically, the watering can came from a taxidermy shop on Rue du Bac that also sells gardening supplies. Had I known at the time of purchase that such an item would be used on the day I was diagnosed with terminal illness, I might have woken up a bit then.

After the plants were taken care of, I just went about the apartment, looking at things. Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee.

What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them? Or would they be given away and used to fill other hungry mouths? Perhaps, along with my record collection, they were destined for a gigantic hole in the ground, where they would sit for thousands of years in compacted darkness, until excavated by robots trying to recoup resources for humans vacating the planet.

I didn’t think about all this back then though, silverware and death and robots going through garbage. I just made toast and ate standing by the window, watching workmen walk around a small hole they had made while I was out at the clinic. When one of them looked up, I waved. He waved back, but his heart wasn’t in it.