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Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at my desk, my window in which I now mostly speak to the outside world, in order to give a lecture on Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis I was not feeling well, in fact I had occasional spasms in my abdomen, perhaps a bladder infection, and I was exhausted and rundown, but still I had prepared as best as I could to give the lecture I had spent the previous day, when I was not teaching, on the couch where I spend most of my time, taking pleasure in slowly rereading the story, hunched over my laptop, trying to figure out how to break it up into sections, while also nursing the small child, who has taken to, almost gleefully, stomping on my abdomen with her bare feet while we are lying down The bladder infection, if that’s what it is, for the pain often travels mysteriously through my body, other times an ache in my breast, or a soreness in my hip, has been most likely caused by having to urinate while the baby sleeps on me, and I continue in this way, so as to squeeze any time available for more work, so as not to wake her This also happens during the hours I am teaching class and in conference with students, almost all in my domestic space when I am also taking care of the child, sometimes plural, children, when my eldest is home from kindergarten, and throughout these labours rarely do I ever take a break to relieve my own body, and now what’s happened is I have the urge all the time, and very little comes out Sometimes lately this body feels so deconstructed that I’m unsure how even to describe it, or assemble it again, in order to move about the world, like a piece of wobbly furniture where all of the instructions are in a foreign language If it was at all appropriate to speak of my own