I want to dance between the monoliths we raise, chase you and be chased. I want the fire always burning, though it is already hot. I want us to flinch faster than the scorpions–they try to stab our hands we dart away. I want us to sing until we lose our voices. Our conversations are written in sand the wind erases. They are recorded on air the wind blows away. They are burned into memories the peyote confuses and the madness destroys.

We will not know where the water comes from, but it will come. Seagulls will dive into the spikes we set for them. They will not know what compels them. The authorities will look, but they will never find us. Our visions are not legal.

What is the best thing you have done without any kind of thinking it through?

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

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.

You must have a few projects half started, a few vows made with friends on windy hilltops at two in the morning, a few adventure brochures stashed under your pillow. Maybe this is the summer you follow them through.

What do your dangling projects mean to you?

I have kept the phrases my friends and I made up. 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 is “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. There are others I can tell you if we meet. These phrases are the best things I am keeping. The things I left behind were difficult to part with. Otherwise there would be no virtue in giving them up. There was a Spanish helmet everyone thought preposterous, but that I loved. There was my guitar that, miraculously, stayed in tune for three straight years. There was my best friend.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? The route follows secondary roads where towns have had time to grow, places you cannot reach any other way. The curves, the stops, the boredom. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly. I could have flown, but that would ruin it—too clean, too impersonal.

When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. I will part my lips to breathe and let the dry air dry me, Austin. I will be in the thick of your scent, your dust. Any change worth making has to come up from the ground with the heat, has to press against the soles of the feet.

I don’t know who you will be; I have rinsed my expectations clean. But I want to feel that rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where laughter leads, to kiss you without knowing how a kiss can thrill. And you will give me a new phrase.

The second series are pictures of you. At least I assume they are. Your feet in sandals, on the pebbles. The arc of your hip, with the sea as background. Your hand grasping a blue scarf. Edges of shoulder, neck, earlobe, lips, always in a new location, in order from pre-dawn to post-sunset, never in a mirror. Hints. Nothing to identify you.

The third series are pictures of things I would never have seen without you. At least, I would never have seen them in the same light, from the same angle, with the same ideology, with the same patience. A seagull picking at a crab shell, unnoticed by the crowd tanning on the other side of a big rock. Five shots of a particular tomato at a fruit stand being examined by five different customers over the course of a day. Another sequence, of an ice cube melting on your pelvis, first to match the curve, then to vanish entirely. A hang-glider as he runs towards a cliff, one shot of his face in reflexive terror, the next in perfect exhilaration. I had a dream like that. Did you know?

When I found my camera again, it was the last day of my trip, my bags were with me, right beside me, and it was on my table at the café, exactly where I had left it. How did you know I would come back? Perhaps you returned every day, set the camera down and watched. It is such a crowded café. I suppose the owner must have been in on it, too. She always seemed to know something.

Once they have been falling for years, slower and slower, even the leaves and feathers, even the scraps of wrapping paper light enough for the breeze to have lifted, rest firmly enough to stand on. Rising from the middle of our sacred field, an android has gathered and arranged them into staircases, a maze wild as a briar patch, as colourful as November. At rest, he leans on his broom and his shovel.

You are a couple steps ahead of me, singing. Somehow you always are. By some trick of the dome of the sky, I can hear your voice behind me.

I have looked for the end of the world. I was cautioned against this. Many others, having seen it proven mathematically that we are all enclosed in glass, have looked for the boundary and failed. Some say that the android has touched it. Even if that is true, it is of no help now, slumped, as if in sleep, until there is enough material in the sky again to warrant sweeping it into a new staircase.

At a sharp fork in the staircases, you come almost completely around and begin a descent. These are the only times you face me. I want to ask you something, but you touch a finger to my lips, and now I am not sure what my question was, or even if I really had one. I wonder if your eyes always look like this, I rarely see them.

There are people, also, trapped in their falls. It is said this is the only way to become immortal. The fall never ends. You are right to avoid questions. There are no questions that ask, only songs.

We enter the convention through a service door, find its cities of lego and multicoloured blocks, its tricks of magnetism and mechanics. We take photos—though it is impossible to capture places and inventions of the imagination—and later slip the prints under the doors of tourists at the hotels. We cut, lay out and label them like postcards, falsely.

Next we find a protest—there must be one somewhere—and teach the anarchists to sing. We break into the SPCA with toys for the dogs they are going to put down. We ride the glass elevators in the financial district and replace the licenses with drawings, our hope that wonder is more inspiring than safety. We share pies and secrets on the street, run up the stairs until we puke, shower until the water goes cold, in our clothes, with a bottle of whiskey, and kiss to keep our lips warm. We solemnly promise to do whatever it takes to get ourselves fired for honesty, and live by selling our whispers in a gallery. We won’t know our new names for a year, and will refrain from words between sunset and sunrise.

The world presses on me; the people, the things they say, so repetitive, so alone. The cars (where are they all going?), the ads and signs all screaming at me to pay attention. To what?

In a better world there are longer, greater distances, there is wilderness and anarchy. The city becomes like a tiny speck, fragile as an outpost in the north, and the next city is a five day flight. But this is the world we’re given—cramped with people and even more, with symbols.

I want to kiss you in a riot, slip a piece of rubble into your pocket, from a wall they are tearing apart. When we meet again, it will be in a desperately crowded dance club, it always is. I will think you are dancing, I always do, but no, you will be in the middle, barely swaying, standing still. I will run with you to the roof, we will locate Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Capella, Rigel, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Altair, Aldebaran, Spica, and Antares, all the stars the city lets us see. By then I will have planned an escape, complicated and unlikely. All that will remain for us is to give it every chance to fail. We will post our secrets onto paper airplanes, wishes that must never come true.