There is a doctor's visit, somewhere in your thirties, that you go to for the body and walk out of with the soul.

The visit is unremarkable. Fluorescent lights. A model of a vertebra on the desk, mounted on a little wooden stand, like a paperweight someone had been given as a joke. The doctor is kind. She asks the questions doctors ask. She does not say anything alarming. She does not say anything reassuring either. She says the thing the body has been doing is almost certainly nothing. Probably stress. Stress is a great explanation; doctors love it; it explains everything they do not want to examine more closely. You leave with a pamphlet you will not read. You walk into the warm day and buy something to eat from a cart, because eating is a thing you can still do.

What happens on the walk back to the train is so small you will never be able to describe it cleanly later.

The body had asked a question. The doctor had given the body the answer the world gives bodies when the world does not have one, probably stress, and we had all moved on. But the body had asked, and the body did not seem to be persuaded by the answer. Walking into the warm day, eating, you noticed for the first time in you do not know how long that the body and the you you thought you were had not been on the same page in years.

I want to say something here, before the next chapter starts.

The body knows first. The body will keep knowing until you listen. The day this stopped being a body story and started being a soul one, for me, was a Tuesday in May. For you it might be a Wednesday in November. The day is the only specific in this Interlude. The rest is in the chapter ahead.