We reunite at a cocktail bar. I’m late – I was dealing with a new, unwelcome flap of fat billowing over my belt (hide it or don’t? I still do not know the answer!) – and since my hair is falling out, I’ve voted to conceal it with a peaked cap. Heath is artsy, and might like this sort of thing. The bar is empty, save for a lone cellist, and I see him straightaway. He’s seated in the back, boots akimbo, dark eyes scanning the pages of a withered Woolf novel.

I met Heath in a similar fashion five years ago, in a coffee shop one borough over. He had been gaunter then, more sullen. He had taken portraits of himself cradling a sandwich like a Tony, captioned them cleverly, and an algorithm had decided I might like that sort of thing. So there we were, looking at each other over a pyramid of drunk cappuccinos as though we might cure the other of all ailments. I knew better, but figured I could, at the very least, learn where his cracked places were and pour them over with gold. The nape of his neck had fit so charmingly in my hand, after all, and how many people in this world could that be so true for?

Here, those moments years and miles offshore, the same internal pool feels stirred. I feel as though I have been long at sea, pining for green land, and a familiar archipelago has risen from the mist. I wave from the street and he finds me, weaves his way through fantastic-looking waitstaff and patrons. I scratch at my cap, second-guessing its charisma. He emerges from the crowd and the eyes of a thousand strangers follow him. How lucky I am to be the object of such a creature’s attention. He is absolutely ageless, a watercolor specter of my time in New York. I do not know what I might be to him.

I greet him with a hug. He returns it – gently, I notice, which makes me question how sturdy I seem. When I left my friend’s apartment only an hour ago, I’d felt like a fully recovered statue barely spared wartime bombing, but perhaps the heat of the underground and the grass stains of midday and the panicked waddlewalk from the bus to here had revealed my fractures, of which there were, admittedly, many. I sit down straight-backed and poised. A wounded woman could hardly sit this prettily, I think before immediately shifting.

Heath orders a hot toddy because he’s funny that way and for the next two hours, he listens to my ramblings of the void.

A month ago, I was dead, and not all that upset about it. A failed pancreas had withered my body to a stem of its former glory and by summer’s end I’d fallen into a coma. I was there for 36 hours, stumbling in the dark to the beat of static without origin. I should not have survived, and yet. The physical scars of that time had hardly left me by then, but in my solitude, I could pretend all to be well. Under Heath’s gaze, so full of gravity, my head feels suddenly heavy, the bruises deeper than bone. He reaches across the table more than once to ask if I feel alright, and I lie, eager to keep his fingers laced in mine.

He asks if I had dreams. I tell him I did, but only for a moment. For most of my otherworldly travels, it is black, and there is no music. There is time, and it passes normally. There are dreams, but they make no sense and contort like hastily drawn animations. A man on his computer. A woman drinking coffee. A cactus. No grand discovery of the universe’s bitter end, no light emanating from Jesus’s chiseled chest. Just a vestige of Casper Sleep Inc’s ASMR channel.

Death is a funny thing – what, with the skulls and the scythes and the hissing serpents, it hardly seems friendly – and yet when It arrives, It does so as gently as a sailboat come in to port. I can still sometimes hear the water’s tranquil lapping, see It peeling an orange, feeding scraps to the green bay below.

Heath listens, and he nods, and he pretends I’m making sense. He is an actor – and a good one – but so am I, and I’m not buying it. I’ve gained ten pounds since the diagnosis. My hair is like sargassum, crudely belched up by the sea. My body is weak but bloated, perpetually sprayed with sweat and pink with exhaustion. When a stranger bumps my wrist against the table, I pretend there isn’t a picc-line hematoma the length of my arm there and swallow the tears.

Heath asks for the check before I’m through with my drink, and I suspect I am being let down. I could hardly blame him. He would be perfectly justified in slinking off to some other Brooklyn bar where the girls are fun and thin and not still yearning for their coma. I run a hand over my glucose monitor and consider what an earlier version of me might say at a moment like this: Something clever, something sensual, but all I hear back is the echo of the cave wall, bouncing the question emptily from corner to corner. There is nothing left of that person. The echo is still making its ever-quieting rounds when Heath leans close and says, “There’s a quieter place down the street.”

Heath leads us down the darkening sidewalk, away from the buskers and the bachelorette parties. He glances back to ensure I’m keeping pace and wraps a protective arm over my shoulder, his focus never meandering to the kaleidoscope of beauty about him. He really is something of a curio. I never much cared for this city – it tends to reject my tax bracket –  but through Heath’s reflection, it seems almost delightful: Streetlights, stoop pumpkins, Si Tu Vois Ma Mere and the dancing dwellers on Halsey and Wilson. Everything lovely about New York has implanted itself in him, and everything ugly has been discarded like the orange peels. He really is wonderful. I think of telling him so, but then someone’s dog bites at our ankles and the moment is gone.

Hours later, he’s standing over the kitchen sink in his boxers, washing our dishes. I’m curled up naked on a barstool cleverly hiding the injection scars with my knees and watching the rising steam settle on his shoulders. There is no angle from which he does not look like a prince of some forested kingdom. I make some joke about it or about my glucose machine – bleating from the other room – but he only smiles at the suds.

Heath, wonderful as he is, can also be mercurial. His shifts in mood demand recognition. It is late. He has plans tomorrow. I realize dishes and mini medical dramas ought to be reserved for daylight hours or bank holidays, so return to the bedroom and prepare my last injection. He walks in just as I’m pushing the needle in and pauses in the doorway. “Don’t ask why, but that’s really turning me on.” He’s on me in a moment, not as gently as before. He’s seemed to have worked out I can handle a bit more than tender affirmations and breathy caresses. He uses me. It is rough, filthy, delicious, and for nearly an hour, we are back in the days of our true youth.

Soon, he is fast asleep. In moonlight, he seems to drift away from me, wrapped in sheets like a medieval hero buried in fresh spring soil, face blank but bright. My affection gives way to awful longing. In a few short hours he will wake, and I will leave, and I do not know when I might see him again. The thought stirs the pool, and from the open window comes the lapping of water. A sailor’s call from far offshore, a language on the edge of my memory. I am swiftly, distantly adrift in a celestial sea. I steady my eyes on Heath’s shores, but they grow fainter and fainter still until they are nothing more than a fata morgana, the cliff between real and unreal ever-slim. Sleep comes, slipping the surface over my head like a veil and I plummet until even the sun is lost. I am back in the sunken place where Heath cannot yet follow because he is still so alive.

It was June when we fell for the first time, a month when the city is at its most sweet and all things are yellow. We were, the both of us, heartbroken and haggard. My first love had just departed, already in lust with another. Heath had just moved from D.C., the pride of two lifelong academics and likely the sole subject of their dinnertime musings. “How’s Heath? Oh he’s wonderful, just booked a short film, and I’ll tell ya, this one’s gonna be the one to kick it!” It wouldn’t be, and his parents would mourn for their son, but Heath would try again. Once, he was fired mid-production and replaced with a papier mache dummy controlled by the short-haired, short-faced director. It was one of many pockmarks in his long stretch of road, but Heath was tenacious. He would make it.

Just before The Great Bat Scare of the early 20s, we went out to dinner. It was December then, and a half-moon of Christmas trees laced the sidewalk. I was watching a passerby rifle for cash, shoulder the trunk, and trot off into the well-lit night when Heath told me he couldn’t see me for a little while. I looked at him and knew he was serious; he was burning a hole in the coffee canister. He had been offered a hefty role and needed to focus. He seemed reluctant to ask but assured in his need, so I placed my hand on the back of his neck and told him it was alright. We had gone twenty-something years without each other’s company, surely we could survive another month or so. I said this despite some long away signal suggesting we may not.

After tea and coffee, it began to snow – only a light dusting, silent as linden leaves falling into velvet. We stood in the disappearing moon of trees and kissed for a long time. When he pulled away, I was grateful for the neon light burning overhead. It might have flattened any proof of humiliating sadness. We were saying goodbye for just a little while – thirty days, maybe! – and it was certainly not cosmopolitan to admit how much that worried me. I had, despite some effort, grown totally fond of him. I watched him disappear in the snowy dark and took the long way home, massaging the kiss further into my lips with the frozen tips of my fingers.

Three years passed before I saw him again. Following The Great Bat Scare, a bad relationship in Buffalo and an even worse one in Los Angeles, I plotted a midsummer trip back to the city. I felt the weight of unfinished business luring me back, and gave way to whimsy. I was inexplicably thinner now. My hair was long, red, curling always down the center of my back. I was the portrait of a woman remade, and also the portrait of a woman on the brink. Less than three months from then, I would be dead.

But Death, quiet and steady as It is, seems to have invented the element of surprise. For days, I gallivanted through bookshops and breakfast nooks and Sheep’s Meadow and glimmering purple streetsides of the West Village, feeling fanciful and fine. I wasn’t sleeping, but I didn’t need to: I was alive, and breathless, and alive!

When a friend asked me what my last night’s plans were, I said simply, “Heath”. Beyond his name, I knew not what to expect. The Scare’s ruins could still be felt: In the stiff air of walled restaurants, in the general distrust beaming from people’s faces. Maybe Heath, too, was changed. Maybe I was, in ways still dormant to me. But then there he was, perched on a hydrant, reading, black eyes always searching and, upon seeing me, smiling. He was exactly as I had left him and wholly different. I doubt there is any better way to be.

A pigeon thuds itself against the window and I wake, remiss to find the scent of sex long gone and replaced by the nothing of morning. Heath comes in with two hot mugs and offers me the larger one.

A new bald spot has sprung up in the night, so I gather the fallen hair from his bed and toss it out the window, now stained with brown bird blood. If he notices, he pretends not to. We drink, and he asks me questions – about blood sugar, grad school, old friends – and I answer them, thoughtfully as I can. We read through a script, poorly written, but his role is on every page so I lie and tell him it’s a grand affair. We trade books, kiss, trade some more. He offers me breakfast: “Cucumbers and black coffee, it’s been a slow month.” Our faces crinkle in laughter. All these years later, we are still, both of us, trapped in the trenches. It is difficult and dangerous business, surviving.

The morning passes warmly until the sun burns away the clouds and the scent of a dogwood tree breezes northward from the park. Heath rests his head in my lap as we flit through the script once more. His voice is rich and sonorous. I’m soothed nearly back to sleep. A beam of light beckons through the glass, and it is easy to imagine us forever this way: Reading and coffee and early morning debriefs. I can see the whole lot – the long goodbye and the tearful confession, the flights back and forth and the eventual cross-country move, the decorating of a new apartment, monotonous routine giving way to newfound trust, a premiere at The Geffen, professions of admiration and tenacity, the slipping of a simple band onto a simple finger – a life, in the time it takes him to set his empty mug on the desk and say, “Well, better get on with it.”

Months ago – before Death docked Its dinghy and stole me – I left Heath’s apartment at dawn to make my flight out of Newark. He had kissed me sweetly then, wrapped his fingers in the curls of my hair, and held me tightly, as though he distrusted even the minute distance between our eyes. Something had been saved from the long years of separation and silence, and new promises were being made. I vowed to return in the fall, October maybe, when I could attend his premiere and shower him with kisses and hold him under a fading orchard. We could be together again, for the first time, exactly as we’d left it.

This morning, I forgo the peaked cap. Neither of us are feeling artsy in this moment, only naked and gloomy. We linger at the door and kiss, but there is skepticism in it: A space as wide as the ocean and just as vacant. We have been lost, mourned for, resurrected, lost again, and now we try for a second resurrection. It might be too much. We might have been too hopeful. He holds open the door and I can feel him watching me from the top stair. I imagine him there still. It makes the pool stir.

Outside the air is cool and calm. A flurry of white clouds have returned and hang snug against the bricks; there is some threat of snow. I walk towards it, all the way from Bushwick to Kensington, in an effort to prolong the day, but it soon gives way to evening. The night before is fading into obscurity. Upon my return, there is only enough time to pack my things, inject for the road, and wait for a taxi. I wait for a long time.

Death and love are interchangeable admissions of defeat. Familiar and quiet, forward and intrusive, they are like a bedtime story lost in the blankets or a glove rediscovered in an old moving box. It is undeniable in its intimacy. Made just for you, come just for you: There is no one else to whom this hurt may be delivered. I accept it then, there on the curbside, and let tears fall like rain.

And from somewhere amid the fog, I hear the call of a gull, the plashing of something burdensome. The lapping of water over the orange.