One thing seems clear: love comes and goes, but the floor… ahh, the floor, she is always there. Lie with her, cover her, walk on her, she’ll always support you. But she hides her true feelings until you’re old and brittle. Then she breaks your hip.

I had an entrepreneurial episode during my holiday inspired by a high brain fever. I decided to come up with a way to meet the demands of the dead body parts market. Now this may seem somewhat grim at first glance, but with an eye on the saccharine brand of rustic charm peddled by such personalities as the impressively banal Martha Stewart, I may be able to spin this into something desirable to even the most apprehensive of rubes. Namely, a chain of quaint shops I’d like to call “Necrobilia.”

I would position these as forward-thinking repositories (or mausoleums) of showy domestic trifles, mostly made up of bits of polished, arranged or otherwise garnished biomass. To be sure, the consideration of these items as additions to one’s interior design (or costume jewelry) would require that one think “outside the box”–a point I would illustrate with festive coffins. As well, highlighted selections would be arranged daily at displays called “Remains of the Day.”

How wedded we are, creatures of routine, creatures of leisure, to the frail illusion of convenience. It’s only when our car stalls by the side of the road, as we try to describe to the friendly AAA representative where we are over the cell phone, that the illusion flickers. It’s only as we try to make small talk with the uninterested tow truck representative that we realize that comfort can be detached from guilt only to the extent that we are detached from necessity. It’s only as we nod with earnest sincerity to the mechanic’s prognosis that we know how far from home we’ve wandered.

You’d never recognize yourself if you met yourself. Not really. The figure in the mirror is familiar only as your exact opposite. In our own skin we enjoy the perception of perfect synchronization, and of spatial awareness knit into a unified whole. But in a room, left to right and right to left, a self-conscious smile and a swipe to brush the hair behind the ear, this other you would be as a stranger.

Similarly, the unexplored land is right around the corner. There be dragons. All it takes is a turn of the head at an unexpected moment, one that catches our expectations off guard. And when we are at the mercy of serendipity, we often get to meet another stranger. The stranger who is ourselves when we haven’t had time to practice.