Thordis Wolf is a writer and photographer from Austria. Her essay “Bone Marrow” explores the physical afterlife of love — how intimacy, memory, and loss leave traces in the body. It is a raw, dreamlike text about the tenderness of decay, written during a time of transition. The piece traces how desire, grief, and memory linger in the body — how love and loss remain embodied.

I’m on level 0 of a multi-story parking garage, adjacent to some sort of mall. There are six floors up and six down. I’ve been here before. The driveway resembles a gaping mouth under a dentist’s lamp, broader than daylight and half a horizon wide. For a moment, I linger as if trying to remember where I parked my car.

There are people passing by, mostly strangers. Others I have seen before, at least I think I do, but I can’t recall where. One of them I know or used to. My eyelids flutter a few times, then I feel something in my mouth. How familiar it once had been to pronounce his name: Sol. His appearance doesn’t give away the length of time we haven’t seen each other. Sol still looks the same. Baldness hovering over his head like a promise on the verge of expiring. Teeth still as crooked as my physician’s handwriting. His lips widely apart, ill-framing a dangling smile. Sol stops briefly as if his feet touch a line, only visible to him, a line carefully drawn by someone whispering: no trespassing. Sol nods at me. Confused, I nod back. The mutual nod triggers memory: it’s been more than ten years. That’s why there’s no talking—just two heads tilting.

I walk toward the mall entrance. I watch a handful of Gen Zs. They’re filming, toying with exaggerated poses (no V-shaped fingers). Their Starbucks cups sit carefully in the background, arranged in a perfectly randomized pattern. It’s neither chaos nor choreography. For a split second I’m fully immersed. The scent of freshly popped butter-heavy popcorn from the movie theater behind the ever-revolving glass doors jolts me back. I don’t like it here.

I return to the parking garage. I can’t decide whether to go up or down. A brushstroke of wind brings a familiar sound to my ears—so familiar I could sketch its anatomy on a napkin while talking to a friend about how commuting makes people sick. The sonorous roar of a six-cylinder climbs through the rampway. There it is: a champagne dream. A slick BMW e30 drifts up from -1 towards me, stopping right in front of me.

The head behind the steering wheel tosses a gesture in my way. I can’t make out the face of the driver, only eyebrows, as dark as the shadow cast by a black hoodie onto the rims of the unknown face. Without hesitation, I open the pale gold passenger door. I get in. The scent of new-car faux-cleanliness creeps up my nose. The blue Wunderbaum hanging from the rear-view mirror swings like a pendulum, suggesting that 40 years could vanish with one chemical breeze. With my index finger, I brush away the tingling airborne toxins. Still, I take a deep breath. I know what’s coming.

We drift up, up, up and up, tires screeching, rear fishtailing. Yet the driver seems to have complete control over the car. I let my body sink into the dark brown leather seat, encapsulated like a ripe seed in a brittle husk. Each and every atom of my body succumbs to the engine’s vibration.

Suddenly my vision collapses. In an instant, it phoenixes as a screen. A dynamic island emerges, shrinking the field of my view. Percy. Your name appears in the black bar. Left: you by the turntables, doing your magic, the photo taken by your brother, surrounded by snow-dusted trees, framed by the glass music room in your parents’ house. Right: the two oh so familiar icons, the red and the green—hang up, pick up.

I realize: I’m dreaming. But I can’t figure out how to take your call that keeps on ringing. The dynamic island lingers, the fawn-colored BMW still drifting up the rampway. I hear your voice, muffled beneath the engine. All I catch is you calling my name, though I never took your call.

When I wake up, my lashes cling together, as if trying to preserve the dream, to keep your name from vanishing. Instead, they hold on to the weight of sleep not yet gone. I force my eyes open and squint at my phone’s too bright screen in my lazy hands. Typing slowly, thumb joints barely bending, I consult a clunky, ad-choked online dream dictionary.

“Multi-story car park lots are often signs of wealth but can also be representative of moving forward, running away from something, or feeling trapped.”

I can’t decide what I want the dream to mean. Instead, I return to sleep, while you fade. Like wasted breath leaving a body—clandestine, nearly imperceptible. I wished for this before, back when your presence was weight, numbing me. I couldn’t feel you, I couldn’t feel myself. Not even when we were fucking which we still did a lot. It felt right. One time—on the kitchen counter—I was distracted by the lyrics of a song carelessly playing in the background, chosen by an algorithm that seemed to know exactly what was needed:

 “You're flying through my left side I'm slowly diving underground She's fast asleep, don't make a sound It's funny how the love dies.”

You took up so much heart space, that it clenched its ventricles. Upon waking, I remember: now, you’re extricating yourself from my heart, my life, freeing up time and space like I’m nothing more than a crowded hard drive, your traces—big and small—now deleted.

I want to break every single bone in my body. I want to hollow out my bones. I want to turn my thigh bone into a flute. I want to play a tune on that flute, so melancholic that everyone who hears it must hold back the tears I refuse to cry.

You’re gone, almost, but my bones are still dense.

You’re bone marrow.

Rattling sounds on the phone. We take turns sighing. The richness of your deep moaning gives me goosebumps. We exchange fantasies like currencies, which we’re spending generously to buy back long-lost desires and wants from each other, defying distance. I press my ear to the hot, slippery phone. I’m sweating. I’m focused. I’m aroused. I don’t want to miss anything.

After we finish sighing, there’s a pause—a crack in time, unfilled, blank. You say ciao, like you have never said it before and when I say ciao, the lighter in my hand already spits fire.