It’s midnight on a Saturday.

I’ve just read an email in which she talks about feeling tired and skipping some excursion into some Egyptian market and I remember that I dreamed of diagnosis’s last night and grey areas and intangible solutions.  

I don’t want to feel so wholly alone so I turn on the TV and mute the sound so I can read over my own manuscript and mark mistakes in red pen.

On the screen, attractive surgeons in blue scrubs and skull caps peer solemnly into a cavity they have carved around a patient’s open heart.

They suddenly spring into a blur of blue. The camera pans to the monitor machine then back to the team who turn in unison to watch it flat-line.

I stop reading halfway through. It’s a sentence about watching her scar be reopened by her surgeon’s scalpel, which pared away skin in descending shades of pink. How the wound oozed and stank after that and how we cleaned it systematically every evening: unfolding sterile gloves and tools, unwrapping, swabbing, redressing.

It’s four in the morning when I flip the TV off and peel back the covers of my bed. I am tired but lie there in the dark, making sentences in my mind then switching on the light to write them down because no matter how many times I tell myself I’ll remember in the morning, I never do.

When I was in New York, and going out until four and sleeping until six, it was sometimes for the first three hours next to some almost stranger before waking up curled against a wall, twitchy and wanting to run. Whatever guy would be passed out and snoring beside me and I’d lay there, counting the hours before I could safely take the subway home. I never wanted to be there when he woke. Whoever he was, he never cared that I wasn’t.

I’d ride the train to my apartment around seven with the waking world: men in suits reading the Post, women in sneakers, carrying their heels, and construction workers in bandanas holding lunchboxes and short blue coffee cups.

When I got home, I’d shower off the cigarettes and coke dust and braid my wet hair and toast a bagel and eat it slowly at my desk, looking out the window onto the corner of fourteenth street. Then I’d dust off my palms and climb into my twin sized bed where I’d sleep through the daylight hours until evening, when maybe I’d wake up and do it all again.

I hate to admit it but these days I am getting progressively worse at sleeping by myself. If I were home, with her, I might tiptoe downstairs and stretch out next to the small shape she makes under blankets and sheets. She’d wake up when I did this and groggily pat my hand and I’d whisper, I can’t sleep.

Isn’t it strange, she might say to me, That we leave little kids in beds all alone?

I’m not a little kid though, I’d say and she’d turn over to face me, Well none of us are designed for it, honey.

I am not a little kid but sometimes I still flutter eyes open and think I see a shadowy figure standing on the threshold. Or imagine the clicking sound of the front door lock, as if turned by my attacker. This started in New York when I moved uptown and started to write. Stopped everything I did to make myself smaller; to make myself forget. Started switching on the light to write out sentences and slowly, watching them become strings, whole pages. And it seems contradictory somehow, that the moment I stopped throwing my life away, I started to fear losing it. Or maybe it makes total sense.

There was this poet in a film I saw tonight. He was dying of AIDS and angry and sad and tired out about it. Speaking of his work he said he only ever wanted to write it all – everything. And I knew just what he meant. Every shift of feeling, every sight, every smell. Whatever stands eclipsed within a memory of a moment; that’s what I want to get at with these words and I wonder if maybe I am writing about whatever I’m writing about these days – her illness, an awareness of some impending end and the terrifying beginning that it might bring – because it somehow encompasses the Everything I yearn for.