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

I used to use darkrooms for photography, and one thing I got from that was knowing the length of thirty seconds. When are you the most aware of time slipping by?

What is the best sound something that breaks makes?

There is always another way out. Your same imagination that has you in its trap can have you anywhere else. Have you ever known someone who came to the brink, believed in the trap, then found a way free?

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.

Have you ever wondered if someone was really listening? Or why they pretended to listen in the first place? Or why you do?

Have you ever gotten almost to the point of just telling someone how you feel, and then backed off? Have you left many almost-confessions behind you?

If they ever do figure out once and for all what makes us exist and experience that existence uniquely, and if we read that explanation and nod and shrug and it makes total sense and we can even grasp it intuitively, it’s still going to be mind-blowing when that mysterious sensation of it chases everything else out of mind for a tiny moment, a sensation impossible to hold on to.

If you were on one of those floating cubes, what would you be doing, how would you be balanced?

The text for this installment is taken from a poem in a series I am writing about (or from) pets.

What do you think about the relationship between creation and death? Does an awareness of death drive artists to create more urgent, more honest work?