I looked up at E's window and stared until the light came back on ...

“Isn’t it a strange thing, J, to be in the house of someone who has just died, to be in the very room in which they passed away, left us? Someone who was such an enormous part of our lives?” E had asked me one rainy day which now seems like a very long time ago.

She slipped her arm around me and we held tightly onto one another, isolated in the centre of the bedroom of our recently lost friend. E told me later that she had wanted to touch his belonging, to touch his fingerprints before they faded, to make one last connection, whereas I had been fearful of even brushing against anything, as if his possessions carried some illness, the death disease.

“How does it make you feel?” I had said.

“Closer to death J, much closer to death,” she whispered against my cheek, her arm tightening around my waist. “Closer to the dividing line. Standing on ice. Driving too fast. Falling, falling.”

I simply felt guilty of the fact that I felt nothing at all except the desire to quit the scene. I felt that the room was sucking me into some void, and that if we stayed here long enough the door would not open when we chose to leave, or if it did, there would be nothing outside. Perhaps that is because, unknown to E or anyone else, we’d had the same taste in toxins, and looking at his empty bed and his scattered clothes, knowing that none of them would ever touch his body again made me feel close to death also, but closer than I could ever explain without exposing my appalling weaknesses.

I stood motionless, staring at the reflection of her face in the rain-streaked window. I hope I never have to see her with that expression ever again, I had thought.

But of course, that is exactly how she had looked that day we met in the café and she told me about the man who had appeared in her apartment.

*