‘I’m becoming a building’, she said, and turned to me as though it would make sense in my mouth. The words echoed in the distance between us. She pulled away, slowly, moulding to the air behind her. I wondered if my hands were holding a pair of strings rather than a spine. ‘I’m sorry?’ This all felt very slow, sort of like lofi pop in a dusky foggy nightmarish room you can’t pull yourself out of - and you just seem to stretch out for the door but get no further - for the rest of time. ‘I’m serious,’ and she laughed then, but more like choking. Her voice grew thick like it was full with pools of moss. Grey green, if a cough were a colour. Time seemed to move faster though, after this interlude, but she did not return to me. Instead she moved in orbitals around small things in the room; an apple on a book, a plant on the bookcase (as she bit into the apple), a clock on the desk (as she watered the plant). I wondered if she was always rushing. ‘My veins are getting bigger,’ she said in a mouthful of apple tissue and juice, ‘they are like dilating and it hurts. Feels like they’re gonna burst or something’. ‘Omg that sounds awful - can I help at all? The look she gave me I can only describe as a cloud settling before the rain comes. Expected, sunken and blue. She did look blue, which I hadn’t noticed before. I moved closer to the desk from behind which she had melted into a chair. ‘I feel a bit like those old mossy churches. They’re a bit dilapidated and there’s nothing you can do because no one has the money for forgotten buildings but everyone kind of likes it that way you know? Half done,’ she said as she spun once in one complete circle on the chair. slowly. rhythmically. predictably. ‘You kind of forget they are there,’ she continued, ‘they blend in with the sky in some horrible aura reminding you of concepts you can’t understand and then you touch them by accident almost. It’s a building and you couldn’t see it. It’s grey and fading. That’s atrophy that is - buildings are the same as bodies.’ Naturally, I hadn’t thought she was right until she died and I understood why they called it ‘stone - cold’ death.