Given the caretakers I have seen at deathbeds, it’s a valid description. Your last soul mate might be your spouse, or it might be your child. It could be a best friend, or maybe even a death doula. It’s who is holding your hand when you finally have to let go.

He sets his empty mug down. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’ve been doing all this time. But I’ve seen how you finish his sentences, and how he knows what you’re about to say before you say it: like you’re twins with a secret language. I see the way you look at each other—not like you want to get under each other’s clothes, but like you want to get under each other’s skin. I think it’s really pretty simple, Dawn: who do you want with you, when your time runs out?”

Alberto stands up. “I’m going to bed. Don’t fuck with my computer.” At the doorway, he turns. “I think he was a dick for not telling you about her,” he says. “Just for the record.”

* * *

—

MY MOTHER USED to say that if there was bad energy in the house, you could put a glass of water on top of the fridge to absorb it, and when you poured it down the sink the next day, your troubles would be gone, too. Hedging my bets, I stumble into Harbi’s kitchen and fill a plastic cup with water, set it on top of the dingy old fridge. I pour a second cup to take back to my room.

I stop in the magazine first. It’s dark, so I turn on a single work lamp, which blinks down at the exterior coffin on its trusses. I can so easily imagine Wyatt bent over it, his shirt shifting across his shoulders as he leans down to better see the text at the bottom. The shaft of light illuminates the peret kheru painted on the coffin, the invocation offering. There’s such a beautiful simplicity in believing that by speaking a wish, you can make it happen.

“Dawn,” I whisper. “Wyatt.”

But this isn’t Ancient Egypt, and I am alone and drunk.

I pad down the hall, holding my breath at the silence. The last thing I want is to hear them together. I let myself into my bedroom and sit down on the bed and see it—a limestone flake on my pillow, with a hieroglyphic message scrawled in Sharpie:

Neheh djet. Forever and ever.

I don’t really know how to start this. Hello seems too formal, and Remember me? seems ridiculous. Besides, I know you remember me, because I remember you. That was never going to be in question. The bigger challenge was whether we’d ever be able to forget.

I imagine that it’s a shock to get this letter. I mean, it’s been years. Maybe I’m being presumptuous to think you would welcome hearing from me. Maybe you’ve done a better job than I ever did at taking the past and plastering over it. Now that I’ve made the decision to have this conversation, one-sided as it is, I am struggling to figure out what I want to say.

I guess I will start here: I haven’t thought of you every day. But I haven’t never thought of you, either. When I do, it isn’t the kind of recollection that feels wispy or comforting. It is visceral, the clean cut of a sword. One moment you are not in my mind and the next, you are so sharp and intense that all my attention is focused there.

So you see, even after all these years, you take my breath away.

* * *

—

THIS IS HOW a body dies: it’s very intelligent, so it conserves the heart and the lungs and the brain. It starts to dump the things that aren’t important. The first thing to go is peripheral perfusion, the blood to your hands and feet. If you press on the nail beds, color doesn’t rush back in. Then the kidneys shut down. Bowel sounds disappear. Blood pressure drops. The heart rate increases. Body temperature lowers. Breathing becomes labored. And then you fall unconscious.

Win is actively dying now. As she requested, I will be with her more and more. Some days, we do not have a single conversation; others, she is lucid. When she can, we write her letter. Because she is too weak to hold a pen, I print her words in careful small letters on the back of her painting. In the middle of a sentence, she sometimes stops and drifts away for moments, hours.

Before my mother died, even when she was unresponsive, I found myself touching her, like I was the one tethering her to existence. I would hold her hand. I would rub her arm. I would curl up next to her. I was doing it because I knew that once she died, once the funeral home came and carted her off, I was never going to be able to touch her again.

I am spending so much time away from home with Win that by the time I get back at night, the household is asleep. I always tiptoe into Meret’s room and kiss her forehead as she sleeps. Then I slough off my clothes in the bathroom and crawl into bed beside Brian.

We have maintained a fragile peace, in spite of our argument about Wyatt. I don’t know if this is because we have so few hours together right now that we are making the best of it, or because we are afraid to reopen a wound. Even though he sleeps through it, I curl my body around him or wind my arm with his or tangle our fingers together. There’s nothing sexual about it, just a desperation, like when my mother was dying.

I wonder if I touch Brian because I know my time with him, too, is coming to an end.

* * *

—

Do you remember the day we tried to find the perfect blue? Some of the details are fuzzy, but I know it was raining. We were in the good studio, the one with better light where the radiator didn’t belch like an old man. I couldn’t mix my paints to match what was in my mind, and I was trying to explain it to you, but I failed in English and in French. I was sniping at you and you were snarling at me, and finally, you grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the studio, out of the building, to the metro. First we went to the Louvre, and you dragged me through hallways from one painting to another: from Lady in Blue by Corot with its steely cadet silk highlighted against the orange fan tip to Colin Nouailher’s Melchizedek and Abraham, vibrant and cobalt, to the Salle Henri II with Georges Braque’s The Birds on the ceiling, rich midnight that bled into royal purples. Like that? you asked at each stop, but I shook my head. So you took me to the Musée d’Orsay, where we bathed in the teal of Monet’s Water Lilies, and drifted in Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rh?ne. Finally, we stood in front of The Church at Auvers, beneath the cool azure blanket of its sky. Closer, I told you, but not quite.

We sat on the banks of the Seine and looked in its depths. We lay on our backs and pushed the clouds away with our imaginations until we could see nothing but blue, blue that hurt, blue that became the black of the universe. What are you looking for? you asked, and I said, I’ll know when I see it.

We tried to find my blue in the pottery sold by a Turkish man in a street market; in a handful of bursting berries. We stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant with a tank full of live fish and stared at their rainbow scales. We brushed our fingertips over the heads of pansies in window displays, and counted the navy knapsacks of schoolchildren in uniforms.

We went back to the studio, finally, and you mixed paint: aqua and cerulean, indigo, sapphire. You took your brush and stroked them in stripes on the back of my hand, up the inside of my arm. We watched the twilight, all the blues of night being born, and you turned me into art.

It was when you moved in me, when you cried out my name, that I found the color I’d been searching for. That blistering blue of your eyes. I’ve been looking for it ever since.

* * *

—

YOU CAN’T HAVE death without birth. The Ancient Egyptians believed that before creation, there was only unity—no death, no birth, no light, no darkness, no earth, no sky. Just an undifferentiated oneness, into which something had to be carved.

Atum was the androgynous creator god. His name literally means All. The Coffin Texts say that Atum created the first male/female pair. He masturbated into existence Shu—the luminous space between sky and earth, and spat out Tefnut—the divine moisture. In Middle Egyptian, the word hand is feminine, so the male Atum has a feminine element of himself that he uses to fashion the world.

It’s because of this belief that Egyptian religion uses the concept of syncretism. Two deities who appear as separate gods in temples can be taken back a generation, before they split. Amun-Re is the hidden Amun and his visible form, Re, together. You start with a unified whole, and then as time passes, you differentiate and organize and divide. Creation, by definition, is separation. Moving forward means being split apart.

This is what I think about, when I can’t fall asleep at night. When I stare at Brian across the table and try to remember who I married.

* * *

—

Time is a construct. Our brains take eighty milliseconds to process information, did you know that? Anyone who tells you to live in the here and now is a liar. By the time you pin the present down, it’s already the past.