We discovered my Popo was leaking pink, lemon-scented embalming fluid from the needle holes in her skin, the day of her burial. I think I'll die here, frantically working on my thesis. My life can be reduced, at this point, to pixels and turpentine and painting portraits of the things that frighten me. Death doesn't frighten me so much as the prospect of dying. Or living for years, unhappy and discontent and unwilling to take the risks to change.
Death is nothing.
Then again, I take little catnaps on the same couch my skeleton model sits on, lying down right next to me. A bit undernourished, but Bones was once a real person, donated to art after her death. Little chips of her flake off when the bones rub against the steel joints, and she smells like a cross between dried seaweed and calcium. I can't put her on a hard surface for fear that she'll break. It's an odd thing, to wake up bleary and disoriented at midnight in a dark room, and have the first thing you see lying next to you be a cold, yellowing skeleton.