Sand filled the bed, tracing a yellowish line from my sweaty back to his as he slept beside me. I turned to look at Lorenzo. A streak of light from the streetlamps, filtering in through a crack in the ramshackle blinds, illuminated the wet grains along his neck and back and his folded arms, as tidy as a text message.

Boxing up all your feelings in a single phrase is very convenient: it's an insurance policy against the mysteries of the subconscious. I relied upon that phrase where everyone takes shelter, that well-heated room where one can sit rapt in prayer. I relied upon my desire and upon my cloistered state within my desire. I trusted the self-abnegation that you could build inside, already thoroughly tested over the millennia by human animals on themselves: I thought I'd found safety.

Its loneliness in the bowels of the earth and the worm invasions certainly didn't do it any good, but I didn't let appearances deceive me: I liked seeing my body open up, revealed little by little behind the flesh, like a confession. It was full of organs: that is the true meaning of inner beauty.

She'd put up a sheet of paper behind the counter that said AWAKE AND SING, YE THAT DWELL IN DUST: FOR THY DEW IS AS THE DEW OF HERBS, AND THE EARTH SHALL CAST OUT THE DEAD. ISAIAH 26:19. "What's that?" "Resurrection of the bodies. The Bible is very clear on this point. We shall rise again, Dorotea, we shall rise again."

I myself, or the world, go on as before. And to think that I expected so much from death. At the very least, a conclusion. I believed in an end. Deep down I was an idealist, and I had no idea.