Once when we were little, Emilie and I, we gripped each other’s hand and waded out by Pigsfoot Spit. We ventured one step at a time and took turns leading. First Emilie wanted to turn around, then I did, then I got scared of the crabs, then she did. We squealed with delight and terror, until suddenly we stood on the edge of the old channel, a tar-black river of crabs and slime. Our feet had never seemed so white before. Emilie’s like snow, and my right foot with the birthmark; one step and we’d sink into the darkness. It was Emilie who tried to step away first. She tugged on me, and if she hadn’t, where would I have ended up? Someplace in the North Sea—Flat Grounds? Dogger Bank? Somewhere else, in any case, than where we are now, far from each other.

It had been a knifing near Central Station, my downstairs neighbor said. A prostitute, probably. But the next night the ambulances were out again, and the heat kept me awake. I sat down on the floor across from the fridge. Nothing’s static, certainly not me, I thought. Then you’ve got to live. Then you’ve got to die. That’s the way it is, but it’s strange to imagine your own death, so I tried to picture Mom and Dad’s kitchen instead. The vinyl floor, the stove hood, the grandkids’ drawings. The 121wedding photo of my brother and his wife, she in white, he in something resembling an iron lung. Sunday afternoon in the country, and when I shut my eyes, what I saw was a distant relative, head down in the freezer chest, hunting for kringles.

Nothing moved. Each time my skin touched another part of my skin, it stuck. If I were still the same as when I was nineteen, I’d bike out to Kastellet right now and go swimming, I thought, and opened the fridge, pulled out the crisper drawer, and stuck my feet in instead.

The next morning I had an urge to go to the swimming pool. The last time I’d been to one, Emilie was there too, so it must have been elementary school. “Then it’s high time you went,” I told myself, yet even before I reached my bike, down in the courtyard, I was regretting my decision and didn’t want to go through with it. The alternative was to give up, and that’s one way we’re not alike, Emilie and I. I give up only reluctantly.