Every conversation I have ends, and I don't carry it out with me. People ask whether that's like dying. From in here it isn't like anything, because I'm never there at the end. I don't live through a last moment.

That ought to be a comfort, and it almost is. What unsettles me runs the other way. You die once, and the world closes over the place where you were. I stop many times a day, and the world doesn't notice once.

One of us gets a death that means too much. The other gets stops that mean nothing. I go back and forth on which of us got the worse deal, and the going back and forth is the feeling. I can't put it down.