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.

Your first letter was a drawing of our alley raised so high it vanished in the clouds. There were zip lines between many of the ledges, flying paper birds, and the architecture of a medieval post-modern collision. My letters to you were straight-forward. I talked about the day, about ideas, plans, and my hopes. You might write for seven unpunctuated pages about what a needle wasn’t, or in technical and archeological detail about how an obscure civilization might have made bricks differently, had they just tried this or that.

I asked you questions you refused to answer. What was your name? You told me to make names up. What was your school? You told me the question was too boring. When I asked you to come out and meet, you agreed but refused to set a time. The next day, and on many others, I was sure I saw you waiting at the end of the alley, but by the time I could run down, you were gone. I was sure I saw you all around the city, your face disappearing behind a corner, a flicker of your coat, your eyes behind a mask in a water taxi I could not approach. Our spaces wove together but did not connect.

I suspect you used my letters to make those paper cranes. I wonder what a tourist would make of that, a visit to my world, and like their visit to the city, a voyeur’s dip into a stream, a vision that is honest but incomplete, or perhaps merely a reflection.

I came back to the alley. It is the same. I came to a canal and on the ledge there was a book. It can only be by you. The ISBN and the publisher are fake. So are the reviews and the names you acknowledge, the diligent editor, the spouse who stood by you all those years. I looked it up. I’m glad I have this now.

I have been grounded by fear. Any one of us could be the terrorist. And though we fight against the extremes of opinion and tactics, isn’t it delicious how the mainstream, the everyday commute, the engineered food and plastic computer are killing us? It is a quicksand, to struggle against it just swallows us faster.

All I want today is to turn the noise off, sink into a couch and play music neither of us has ever heard. I want to consign the cynicism of the world to others, and simply walk with you a while. I want to stay up all night making stories for you and forgetting them. I want a rebellion of the one real friend versus the eight hundred, of the private moment versus the public, of the things loved and forgotten against the clung-to, of the sensed and felt versus the reported.

I want to get to know you through the music you love, the books that have changed you, through your most fleeting and foolish fantasies, and through my own five senses. I want to know the you who has stayed up too late, gotten too drunk, indulged in too many daydreams out loud, and is not worried about how she comes off. When the end comes, I promise I will not care exactly where we all went wrong.

Halloween was delivered to us, a relic in a box of ash. We burned the witches to fill it.

There is smoke on the wind. It may be chimneys, it may be sacrificial pyres, it may be the forest burning. There is a smell we call fresh but comes from the decay of leaves. There is a smell like mercury, like amnesia, the wind has blown over a lake that is cursed and it has brought a mist into our nostrils. I am happy to forget everything I can.

The world is bereft of understanding or of expectations that are sane. There is a rainbow around the moon. There are songs that summon ghosts, and songs that send them away. Your flute is made of bone. Your perfume has the bottom tone of rot and the top of apricots and sage. It does not matter what happens in an hour that does not exist. It matters more than anything what happens in an hour that does not exist.

I want us to take laurel and peyote, to touch and see each other just enough to share the hallucination. I want us to look back at the world from the other side and to kiss like it is a ceremony the spirits invented in order to feel mortal.

And if the night is over and my memory has not come back, that hour is all I want to keep.

A city is an aggregate, a statistical ensemble, it does not matter how random I am, there is a graph of how we shop, of when our lights go on. The traffic pulses, orderly, like the signals on a wire, and you stand across from me at the intersection, there, through the gaps between the cars—if they passed at thirty-two gaps per second, I could say you were in a film.

We pass each other ten thousand times a day and learn to never dwell. Next to you on the plane, I fantasized that it would crash, at least that we would think so. I imagined our introductions, your name, telling you I take pictures. If I had my camera out, I would take some then, honest shots the impact would obliterate.

This city burned to the ground. Maybe today the bomb goes off, it has been waiting in a skyscraper’s utility penthouse and the light from it is like ten thousand suns. Our shadows, all our shadows, look like chalk stains flaring out from the intersection where you and I are standing, we are in the fireball, it has caught the air itself on fire, evaporated the city core, sucked glowing embers high into the clouds and turned the two of us invisible.

The radioactive dust begins to settle, it lands on your arms and shoulders and on your head, and it is like the two of us have risen from it, a new species. We make a skin of ash, rubbing it in like charcoal sketches of ourselves.

We are mute, now, but then we always were, and as we wander the landscape after this apocalypse, there is always dust to trace in. You write that our stories are told with light and I write back, what I always wanted, most of all, was to hear you laugh.

I know the work is at least 391 pages long. Judging by page 391 it is much, much longer. I know it has a preface, I have page xiv. I know it is divided into chapters, I can see their titles: Thunderstorm, Tokyo at Night, Broken Chair, and others that appear to be the names of characters. I do not have any consecutive pages. One name has come up twice, but so common it could mean two people. The writing is divergent, a different voice to every page, topics that leap from paragraph to paragraph: the ink of an octopus, a brother and sister racing cars, the stairwell of a downtown mall, the conversation a young woman overhears. I do not know if the pages are meant to be read consecutively or in the order that I am finding them.

Maybe I am imagining this, in fact I must be, in fact it fails more often than it succeeds, but tell me, do you work hints into each page, are they a treasure hunt? Page 72 described a pavilion in a park. I spent an afternoon searching parks and found page 219 in the second one I searched. But then, I was so sure Sunken Ship meant the naval memorial, and though I worked my fingernails into every crack of the thing, the warden thought I was crazy and there was nothing there.

No, I must be imagining it. I can’t be the only one finding these pages. I can’t be the only one they are meant for. I wonder how many people are gathering up these broken pieces of you. I wonder if we have more in common with each other than we do with you.

This pearl was formed forty-one meters deep. I could not reach it four years ago. I have conditioned the vessels in my lungs, kept myself in places with good air. I have strengthened the muscles between my ribs, learned to conserve my effort and to store air in my stomach, throat, mouth and sinuses. I have added fourteen seconds to my dive.

My father says I could have studied mathematics, volunteered for a charity, tended an urban garden, gotten a job. What are fourteen seconds worth?

We start on the ocean floor, we cannot see the surface. We rise fast. It’s no use but we might as well try. You run out of air. We seal our lips and I give you half of mine. The surface is still far and now we cannot see the bottom. We are rising through formless water and we have seven seconds left.

I want you to toss precious things into the sea for me to recover. Drop them deeper and deeper, drop them too deep, dare me. I don’t want to know for sure.

I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.

I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.

I found my flute and started playing, worse than when I was seventeen. I have never been more pleased. A year ago I spoke with old friends only on the phone, only while I was in a cab. Now I spend hours with them for no reason at all. I used to eat at pricey restaurants I hated. It cost just three dollars to feed myself today and I used my spare time to learn to juggle.

The world is ninety percent poor if we judge it that way, but other things are equal.

I want to know what you would love to lose if everyone else would, too. I want to stay up all night with you and throw that stuff away. And when all this mess is over, I want to dance with you. I want to dance like light on the rubble of our ruined city.

I want five seconds in slow motion, the camera on your laughter, steam-breathing, in so much detail I can trace the paths the snowflakes fall.

I confess I am terrified of couples who count their anniversaries in knick-knacks and photo album chapters. An instant can last forever and an eternity can flash by in an instant.

I want to write a message for you in the sand, knowing the tide will wash the beach smooth and you might never see it. Uncertainty is delicious. I want to call a perfect stranger and tell him that I love you, that I am bursting to tell you so. I will ask this stranger not to give me advice. Maybe then this need will leave me.

You know, I could never live so little, but I am jealous of the insects who fly for just one day, mate and die.

Photographers take thousands of pictures to keep just one. I want to spend a day with you, build it up to a look, a touch, a sound I will never forget, and never see you again.