I caught my death today.

A knock on my front door roused me from a daydream in my study. When I finally opened it to the chill of the autumn air I found no one there. I allowed a few leaves to blow in while searching for my visitor, then returned to my study, only to find a man sitting in the armchair I had just vacated.

He was me, mostly. There was no mistaking the face, though every feature looked as if it were painted on a canvas then draped over a wire mesh of my skeleton. I suppose his appearance should have startled me, but we met eyes and his presence simply made sense. Without breaking our gaze, I took a seat on the piano bench. His weary eyes were sadder than mine at my worst, and deeper than mine at my best. Before I could guess why he had come at last, he began to tell me the story of his journey to find me.

My death explained that he had been searching for me for as long as I had been alive. He was a child when I was a child. Everything I learned, he learned; everything I saw, he saw; Except for names. As I lived, he walked through the World Without Names, trying to find who he was so that he might end me.

He tried to describe what the world looked like through death’s eyes. He told me to remember those days when my parents took me to the coast after a week of rain. How on a cold evening the sun would reflect off the ocean just over the horizon, yet I could only see a few hundred yards through the mists that covered the beach. He asked me what I thought life would be like if every morning, noon, and night were just like that haze of indeterminacy. Would I, filled with visions of the solid world, eventually build a raft and strike out in search of the sun?

I considered his question. I wondered what he thought of my worst days. Would death cherish the moments when my life most resembled his? Or did the darkness within me make him question his purpose, just as it made me doubt my own? I found I could not open my mouth to voice these questions, though my having thought them meant death had considered them as well.

When death finally came to the end of his tale I could see his frame had emptied even further. His hand folded like tissue paper as he gestured for me to lie on the floor. I am still uncertain whether he had control over me or if I chose to do as he requested. Without looking away from my sullen other self, I slid to the floor and waited for death. He rose from the chair, surprisingly sluggish for such a slight figure. The effort made him shudder, or so I thought. A second shudder nearly rattled him apart, and it was then I realized he was reacting to a banging on the door.

Margaret, the visitor I had expected earlier, stopped by to remind me to take my medication. Fortunately, I had not locked the front door when I had come back inside. I attempted to respond to her voice, but I had no breath left. My other self just stared down at me, the edges of his form decaying rapidly. Margaret found me. She knelt down and began CPR. Every pound of pressure on my chest seemed to weigh on death’s shoulders, until at last he collapsed on the floor beside us.

Death crumbled. The joints of my shadow self stretched, then snapped, then turned to dust. In but a moment only his eyes remained, then they dissolved into mist. I felt the muscles in my lungs awaken. I gasped, and in that first, deepest of breaths I saw the remains of death flood into my mouth. An insidious smoke spread into the smallest corpuscles, hiding in regions of my lungs I had not used in years. The shock nearly made me stop again, but Margaret embraced me. Her touch reminded my chest to rise and fall once again. I caught my breath, and only then did I notice the pain in my chest.

That pain has since faded, but a tight feeling remains in the recesses of my lungs. Sometimes I think a hearty yawn will finally dispel the ichor that lurks there, but it always seems to burrow deeper. I wonder if he is comfortable, now that he is inside of me.