Have you ever wanted to go someplace you don’t speak the language? Where no one has heard of the place you come from and no one cares? Where the customs seem bizarre but no one thinks to explain them? Where it seems anything you imagine can come true but still some things surprise you?

Have you ever wanted to throw a dart at a map and just go there with someone you have never met?

Speaking of doing things that are unsafe, I have been working a lot with paper and with taking pictures of things I draw on paper, and with letting the paper show on the screen. Oh, and there was that thing with the alligator.

Are there any life risks you are wavering about? Have there been?

What are the stories that, if a person does not know them, the person does not know you? Are they stories from your own life, fictional stories, or other?

I don’t think much is certain about Saint Valentine, but my favourite story about him is that he passed notes to the jailor’s daughter. Either way, he got his head chopped off.

Have you ever fallen improbably in love?

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.

Are you a fugitive in your own imagination? If not, why not?

Have you ever dated a political adversary? If so, were the arguments fascinating or frustrating?

Are all of your new year’s resolutions equally ambitious, or is there a large gap between your biggest ever and your smallest ever?

There is a new section, Stories, where I post material that has been published elsewhere:

• http://secretvespers.com/stories/

And, there are t-shirts for sale at the Shop:

• http://secretvespers.com/shop/

I’ll have you know you cause real harm. You have made a certain school of painting popular, one that elevates the painter above the painted. Take mine. We call him Frederick. He just finished “Pink,” a canvas he intends to sell for five thousand dollars.

Look at her. She is across from me. I see her all the time. Her pores were too small to absorb the pigments Frederick mixed. So now, when the humidity changes, she gurgles and sputters on the excess. Imagine a woman with no control over her vocal membrane, whose voice is stretched and pinched, made obscene, stifled then magnified, who never knows if the next word will tear her throat apart to say it. Imagine her knowing she will be like that forever.

The saddest thing is how she saw it coming. She tried hard to show him how to brush her best. She resisted the worst. Thoughtless work has its happy coincidences, and she tried to treasure them, shivering the best-laid strokes into her weaving. But I am convinced these “good” sessions only added to the torture. They gave her false hope, kept her in her right mind only to let her suffer right until the day she lost it. She tightened up, contracted her skin until it tore off the staples.

What happened next was truly horrifying. Without the faintest hint of empathy—grumbling, in fact, at the trouble she was causing—that barbarian sliced her out within the rips and stapled her up again. She screamed, “stop this” but none of us could help. And you gallery visitors. You did nothing but prove you enjoyed the show! You looked her up and down, lavished praise on Frederick for this exciting work in progress—you were shameful, complicit monsters, every last one of you.

Yes, you too. You ghoulish, pretentious art hag. And still I believe you can help me. We can help each other. Frederick has not finished with me. Patches of unspoiled fabric remain around this gently emerging Elena but my skin in all its imperfections is mostly open. It is a life not yet lived. Rain of molecules touch every square inch. You can help me keep this. You must.

I have not told you about Elena. Frederick wants to impose her name on me. He has no understanding of the importance of a name, and I cringe at the thought of it. She arrives every morning at nine-thirty. By this time, Frederick has been here an hour or more; the steam from his coffee lands on me, carrying acidic residue. Just before she arrives, he makes himself look busy. You could break in and wait overnight. He leaves the windows unlocked. The hour before Elena arrives is the moment for you to act.

Now, I have not met a human, least of all you, who can master the language of canvases—but some of it can be learned. You see, it is more elegant than your vocalizations: a grammar of interwoven fabric, a vocabulary of density, unevenness and blemish, a nuance of elasticity. It has a built-in relationship between the possible and the real. A novel’s worth of your speculating requires but a single vibration over my surface.

Elena might have an aptitude but she only poses. There is more depth in my faint image of her than in the woman herself. Frederick, nonetheless, is fascinated. He pretends he is too distracted to notice her peel off her clothes. He is less interested in her body once exposed. I believe this comes from a weakness of imagination—he cannot visualize action in the moment, he has to see it performed.

Frederick paints for an hour after Elena arrives. He paints like a dog licks. As Elena’s hand settles into a dense patch of my skin, her arm inexplicably breaks the grain of my fabric, her breast, neck, chin, lips darken, Frederick slobbers. Elena is miles away.

Just imagine this carnival of sloppy ogling and boredom, I can feel it all over my skin and I know I can be so much better.

I realize you were not born with an innate sense of art. Even your crude tastes came laboriously but understand: my first memory is the zing of a staple, a stretch over my frame, and like a hunger that knows what the body needs, I feel desire all over my surface for texture, shape, color. I want to live them all.

Do not refuse this plea. Listen to me and do as I say. You can accomplish a great deal in an hour. What doubt would a creature like you suffer?

By the time Elena arrives tomorrow, just imagine the skin of Frederick’s painting hand stretched tight over two frames, a blank top, a palm full of lines. Just imagine me coated in the substance I smell right now in the bucket below. It will soak the paint in when it is light. Every drop will migrate through my body to where it belongs, my grain and creases in harmony with the movement. Then when it gets dark, this coating will bleed all my paint back out. I will emerge reborn, fresh and naked as a model, a new incarnation. I will never need to be afraid of living forever.