I really tried, but the truth is that I couldn’t feel the pauses between contractions – maybe because I was too disoriented by the pain each one left in its wake, and too fearful of the one I knew was coming. The moment for the lesson is now.

from inestimable sorrow at all she has lost, to the recognition that it is within her power to offer the world at least some of what C offered us – the presence, the rigour, the holding. As J says this I realise that a similar feeling has been growing inside me as well, no words, just a little bulge of light nudging out.

I’m still in pain, but I want to pause over the fact that, rather than feeling gaslit by the gap between my internal experience and my body’s outward stats, I feel momentarily calmed by it.

I knew then that you wanted me as much as I wanted you, a chaotic and explosive feeling that fuels the birth of worlds.

can’t stop hearing C’s voice saying, ‘Maggie, my dear Maggie.’ No one will ever say my name like that again – no lover, no parent, no husband, no friend. The way C knew me died with her; from now on I will be less loved, less known.

It’s just like Freud’s theory of dreams – it’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind. This is Freud’s ‘talking cure’ – Freud, who died of jaw cancer, for which he had over thirty debilitating and disfiguring oral surgeries.

Watching the waiter refill my sparkling water from a cobalt bottle, I’m moved to tears – it seems so decadent, so kind.

2004, a few months after the accident: J is demonstrating what needs to be done with the tube, telling me how crucial it is to don gloves and sanitise correctly. I speak from my panic and heart to say, I’m sorry, but I just don’t think I’m cut out for this. J looks at me with as much contempt as I’ve ever seen her muster – maybe not all the way to

Every day, before logging onto my son’s Zoom school – We can’t go on like this / That’s what you think. I am talking to myself, a fractal interiority. I try to become interested in other interiorities, like that of the dishwasher. I examine the eggshell caught in the whipping arm, the inscrutable silver disc floating at the machine’s navel. I