Just before I fell asleep I heard water dripping out of the drainpipe in the back garden. Robbie was sleeping beside me; his hand was on my stomach and their steady rise and fall seemed a conjunctive effort. We had just had sex; I was thinking about death. (I am moving away from you Gordon, I know, I am moving back into myself. This is what I meant when I talked about the conjunction of you and me: I am offering a piece of myself to you now, in the hope that you can pick it up and give us both meaning.) The water dripped slowly: the rain had stopped hours ago and what I heard was just the last coalescing drops falling the few inches from the bottom of the pipe to the concrete sidewalk, a slow and surprisingly regular rhythm made more of silence than of splashing. I wondered, then, where the water went, and I thought I remembered the rusted bars of an iron grate, the darkness of a hole visible, or invisible, between its slats. So the water drains from a smaller pipe into a larger, I thought, drop by drop, and then goes where? The canal, I thought, no more than a quarter mile away across Mile End Park, and as I slid closer to sleep my breathing fell in with Robbie’s and my mind fell in with the water, and together—me, the water, and Robbie—squeezed and shimmied our way down that long narrow tunnel until we spilled out into the canal. And the canal carried us to the Thames, and the Thames carried us to the Channel, and the Channel was like the clasped fingers of the Atlantic, holding us in its embrace. I was almost asleep by then, and I thought, children leave their parents this way, and lovers leave each other, and the soul will leave the body like this, like a drop of water making its way back to the ocean, slowly joining and rejoining and joining yet again, until what was whole once becomes, once again, whole.