‘I’m sure,’ I called down through the doorway, readying myself to step out into the cold.

I hoped I had a heater over there. It was a surprise these last days, how cold my hands and feet had become, as if all the blood and warmth and sustenance was being drawn from my extremities and redirected elsewhere. Which I suppose it was. My body had changed its priorities, without consulting me, without my permission. I felt like a deciduous tree, the winter coming on, unstoppable, and all the green nutrients draining from my waving leaves in order to sustain the life at the core.

The driver looked up at me standing uncertainly in the light of the bus. ‘I’m sorry, but are you always this pale? You don’t look well. You know, I can call ahead to the motel, it’s right next to the depot –’ I held up my hand and he held up his own hands in response and shook his head. ‘Alright, I’ll leave you here. I don’t like it, but I’m bloody cold, and you’re the boss.’

‘Yes I am.’

I stepped out after him, down the mini spiral staircase out of the bus, feeling very much like a ‘young lady’ now, like someone from another time, alighting from a coach onto a lonely roadside. Maybe that was who I was now, someone who alighted from coaches. Standing outside of the bus, for the first time, I could see the sky. And it was breathtaking. Steady stars burned coldly without a flicker, not a breath of movement in the air. The only sign that it had ever been raining was the bitter cold and the slight splish-splashing of my feet on the road, and the way that the stars at the horizon were blotted out by the receding bank of cloud, back in the direction from which we had come. It was a wide open sky. The world was wide open.

‘Alright,’ the driver was saying. ‘And there’s your . . . what’s it called again?’

‘Memento mori.’

‘Right. And . . . what is that?’

The cold of the ground crept quickly up through my shoes and the cold of the air worked on my nose and my ears and my fingers, numbing them into stiffness. I stamped my feet and looked back up at the wondrous sky. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I guess it is a kind of reminder.’

‘A reminder?’

‘Yeah. It’s reminding us that we’re all just skeletons, you know. We’ll all die soon. “Memento mori” means “Remember death”.’

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘That’s a pretty bleak outlook you’ve got there.’

I shrugged. ‘I didn’t choose it. It was a birthday present.’

‘What?! Some present!’ he said. ‘“Here’s a picture. You’re gonna die. Happy birthday!”’

I laughed. I felt so light standing there, practically weightless. ‘It’s supposed to make you cheerful actually,’ I said. ‘Make you feel kind of in the now. And humble. And focused. Or something.’

‘Or depressed.’

I laughed again. I felt amazing. Suddenly. Inexplicably. ‘No, it’s not supposed to do that.’