When Chloe called me in the car that Wednesday on the way to Costco, my boyfriend Damian and I were arguing about whether or not we would be willing to swallow a goldfish for money. “You have no concept of how the real world works,” he said. “That’s pretty fucking pejorative,” I was saying, as my phone lit up with that stupid picture of Chloe’s stupid face, filtered to have giant eyes and little deer ears and white deer freckles on the forehead. She always acted like her filtered...
I'd been married six months when my husband died choking on an oyster. I was 23 and he was 27. I grew up by the ocean but hated the mineral-salt reek of seafood and wouldn't let him bring any into our home. While I was out with my friend Lily at what she called 'our local Polynesian discotheque,' he took the opportunity. He came from a long line of fishermen, so I understood he...
Our empirical experience of death is the disappearance from the physical plane of living beings. Such is the fact of our experience from without, that we have by means of our five senses. But the disappearance as such is not confined to the domain of outward experience of the senses. It is experienced also in the domain of inner experience, in that of consciousness. There the images and representations disappear just as living beings...
