I haven’t been able to write. I have ideas, ideas are never the problem. Rather, ideas are exactly the problem: they keep me awake at night, sabotage any attempt to capture them, turn against me on the page.
So I printed my old stories and cut them into pieces. I shuffled the small ones and folded those large enough into airplanes, doves and cranes. I assembled tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons with the fragments and rolled them together as dice. I wrote the parts facing up, and in the logic of seventy waking hours they formed like a hallucination, like the patterns hidden in those books you look at out of focus. On second reading, none of it made sense. None of my ideas do.
What I want is a collision. I want what comes out of the large hadron collider. I want what this city has, a skyline with the remnants of centuries rammed together, an original text with red editing between the lines. I want imperfections waiting to be scratched out, reflections and shadows falling onto the neighbours. I want a street of people who are incoherent in their passing, who are so far apart from each other that you can pluck at those distances like on the strings of a cello. I want so much competing music that there are accidental melodies in the clashing. I want them to last only so long, then veer away again to noise. I want you—the whispers I hear just barely above the crashing of your colours, smells and movement—a conversation left unsaid but glimpsed at in the veering apart of topics. I want the near miss, what can’t be captured yet, and when the dream is done, the only part that lingers.
I think this is the most beautiful of all the lovesick posts so far.
There is so much of you in this one; it’s beautiful.
I love everything about you.
When you go to a really good symphonic orchestral performance, I mean a REALLY good one, sometimes there’s a pause — a breath — a longer breath — before the audience applauds, a little more quietly than they might have done had it been less Really Good, but maybe a bit more loudly, energized by that moment’s pause; it’s hard to predict in advance.
Your writing is epic. And I absolutely envy you.