Do not be frightened of these sensations. Though disturbing, they are natural, as pain is a useful signal that tells us we have been injured. There is a growing suspicion that the toothy fabric of your life is not what you had intended it to be. You need some evidence that things were supposed to be like this.

At one point, I am in a hotel on the East coast of the United States of America, with a group of strangers preparing to say good-bye to our lives. We are not prohibited contact with our loved ones, but others, like me, have decided to forego it as simply too painful to bear. Some of the others spend late nights whispering last words to someone on the other end of the telephone, articulating hopes that they will be together again soon, or that the coming separation will pass quickly. I spend the three days we have here letting my memories grow quiet, pausing like a father in the doorstep of his children's room late at night as they fall slack into sleep.

The rooms of all those who are departing soon are located on the same floor. We pass each other in the hallways and look into the unfamiliar faces, knowing they are the beginning of the world we will soon join. We have only each other to hold on to. Everything else is being drawn out of us like blood, replaced with the strange perfumes and humours of the future. We share only this fluid, something held between us that is both awful and wondrous, like a thin strand of spit suspended between two lips after a first kiss.

My roommate, a stranger for now, has my name. I sink into a steaming bath in the hotel's old porcelain tub while he talks to his family on the phone in the next room. Only hours now remain. I imagine you there with me, sitting across from me in the painfully hot water, your legs curled around me. Only our heads are above the mirror of the bathwater, and we regard each other across the still surface, silently, to the sound of the young man's muffled voice saying good-bye. It is a sensuous and sad thought, and I cannot yet let it dissipate. When I rise from the tub and press the metal lever to let the water out, it will fall in tightening spirals down the drain and into the netherworld beneath the hotel. It will join other fluids, drained from hand-washings and rain on parking lots, and fall in blending swirls under the earth until it is indistinguishable from any water anywhere. This is my memory of you.

You sometimes feel, standing in a kitchen with a knife poised over the flesh of a tomato, or walking past a stopped-up storm drain, that your life has provided you with an embarrassment of riches. The universe, though cruel and impersonal, has given you moments in which you can honesty say your are completely happy. It is, oddly, almost embarrassing. You are vaguely uncomfortable at these moments, as if the complete abandon you feel during them suggests the release of death. You do not want to be so happy that you believe, in that second, that you could die without regret. And so your regrets tie you to this earth, animate you, fuel the quiet engine that drives time through you.

You stand up in the tub and watch the rivulets run down the length of your body. The hotel's towels are so heavy that you use both hands to pull one off the shelf. In the next room, the young man with your name hangs up the phone and there is a brief silence. You sense that he is listening for some sound from you, and you pause and wait for each other with only a wall between you. The you step on to the tile floor to dry off, and you hear the television go in a riot of voice and music. Your reach for the drain.

You are often happy. Yet although you can think of no single decision that has brought you here, you sometimes feel this is not supposed to be your life. There is another you somewhere out there that has done things differently, and you need to ask that person how they feel about all this. You envy identical twins -- the way they know their own double, speak to a manifestation of their own potential to do and be something entirely different. You've lost your double in the messy carnival of the world, and you are running with increasing desperation from human one face to another, looking into each for signs of recognition, and then moving on.