I lay the woman down on a gurney. Her breathing shallow. Her head engorged. She takes my face in her hands.

‘My husband?’ she asks, and I shake my head. I don’t know where he is, or even what he is any more.

‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call?’ I ask, and the woman shakes her head.

‘What about Jennifer? You asked for her in the car?’

‘My sister,’ she says. ‘She’s gone.’

‘One of the disappeared?’

She shakes her head no. ‘We were young when it happened.’

I fetch her a glass of water and sit beside her in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs that seem to plague classrooms and hospitals. Across the ward, on a shelf by the window, is an antique anatomical bust of the male body. Some of the organs have been removed and arranged round the figurine like offerings.

I think back to my conversation with the therapist. To the belief that we parcel ourselves up and give parts of ourselves away. That the body is a house occupied by those whom we love and have loved. But the same was true for those we have hurt, those we have failed. We harbour their pain and we pass it on. We inflict it catastrophically and infinitesimally. Piecemeal and in perpetuity.

The silence between us grows lustful, wanting. The woman winces and adjusts herself on the gurney. ‘I saw her today, when it happened.’

‘What was it like?’ I ask.

She’s quiet for a long time. ‘It felt easy.’

I feel an imagined and distant rumbling, as if the earth is yawning, waiting playfully to swallow me whole. ‘There is someone I would desperately like to see again,’ I say, rubbing circles into my palms.

‘They won’t be the way you remember them, not exactly. They are changed. Imagine everyone you have ever met, even in passing. Lovers, guardians, mentors, strangers in the street. Imagine every word you have ever spoken to another living soul. Then imagine yourself as a composite of those remembrances.’

It feels as though a knot has been tied at the centre of my head. A thousand hands reach out of the darkness to pull it tight.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say.

‘We don’t fall in love with people, but rather versions of people. Manifestations. The act of love renders them incorporeal. We carry the idea of a person even as their reality ages and dies before us.’

The woman winces again, holding her stomach, sucking in breath.

‘We never truly stop falling in love because the act of living is itself a process of constant reincarnation, a perpetual reconciliation between what was once and what is now.’

‘But there is danger in it,’ I say. ‘The risk that reality diverges too harshly from expectation, from desire.’

‘You’re beginning to see,’ says the woman, and I notice that the room has filled with a cold yellow light. It bounces off the ceiling and pools on the floor, like sunlight on water. I’ve seen this before, I think to myself, and turn to see our therapist standing in the hallway.