I hear footsteps and a door slam shut. What time is it? I lie in the dark, eyes wide open, awake.

“How do you feel?”

I can’t make out the exact response. I’ve missed it.

“No! You can’t say anything. Especially not to her.”

Another muffled reply.

“You’re not listening!”

Then, silence. I lean over, switch on the lamp, and scrawl a note to myself.

Ask Mike about the voices next door.

I get up.

My slippers make it harder to walk. They’re heavy and stick on the carpet. But without them, my little feet are too cold. During the days, I sit more than I walk anyway. I sit and watch the TV. I sit and I eat. I sit and look at my changed hands, the dark spots and protruding veins, how bony and curved my fingers have become. They look more like knotted twigs than usable human fingers, more like bark than skin.

I wish I had done more. There’s not enough time for me now. I had years and years’ worth of time. It went so fast. It went too fast.

I shuffle to the washroom and then crawl back into bed. I’ve never removed the empty litter box from under the window, even though there’s no need for it now. When did the cat die? Gorky loved to cuddle, especially in the morning. It seems a long time ago now.

Every now and then, I still hear her, Gorky, softly mewing from one of the rooms. It takes me a moment to realize it’s only an illusion, an auditory figment born from loneliness and memory.

Above the litter box two oil paintings hang on the bedroom wall. Massive landscapes. Two of his earliest ones that, for sentimental reasons, he said he could never sell. They’re so big, heavy, like all his work. Does scale on its own show aspiration? Does dimension relate to achievement? I don’t like these paintings of his. I avoid them. I never told him the truth of what I thought. He was fond of them. I would take them down if I could reach them and was strong enough. They’re too heavy for me to move. They always were.

There are other canvases, too, smaller paintings of mine, leaning backward against the wall in the corner of the room. We never hung any of my portraits. I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel the need to display them that way, and I never felt like they were finished. I always wanted the chance to keep working on them, tinkering, revising, revisiting. I was only confident in the excitement I felt and in my dedication to the work itself. Not in the end result. I didn’t believe I could produce anything to affect or inspire others.

“How can you be an artist if you never let people see any of your pictures?” he asked me. “You need the viewer as much as they need you. Otherwise, it’s not art you’re making.”

I did have that far-off ambition hidden away somewhere, I suppose, that there was a chance I might produce something that another person might respond to. But I never told him that. I never told anyone. Even alone now, it makes me ashamed to think I’d hoped it might happen.