Let me perhaps begin like this. Just watch: here I am, legs lazily strutting the room; here now, a long hot bath, revisiting things you said. After, I find myself alone again. I stand at the window in the cheap hotel slippers, watching isolation have its way with the boisterous ocean of city light. A pairing of mynahs came and I, still staring at glass, thanked god for giving us forgetting. That night, I lay in the bath with my ears underwater, sounding each eardrum for the squall of blood. Maybe being alone is this: straining to hear the littler sounds of your heart. Being apart, though, is harder. It's more than a physical impasse. The separation pools everywhere, invisible and taut. You hear it in the minibar's aquatic hum, the aircon's symphonics. Last night, it dripped its way into our playlists, so I crammed into the wardrobe instead, hanging myself up like drying nets. I curled up under the laundry and tried to pour the sense of distance out of my lungs, letting the walls close in and caress my body. When that didn't work, I filled the bath again this morning and gathered our separation in handfuls. As night fell, I immersed myself, hoping to disappear finally into that lacuna. But now - I've woken, and the bedroom is full of fish, tendrils knocking over the nespresso, the television smothered by coral. And the sound of whales bellowing at twilight : having to find names for so many more miles before they meet.