How do to keep yourself out of trouble?

Great plans, laid to waste by great plannings.

What are the things you hope for?

Have you ever felt some way that was difficult to manage?

They say a fog came one summer and lasted ninety days. When it lifted, it took the colours from our irises, revealed a city that had been repainted grey and chipped. No one was left who was in love, but every debt was forgiven.

I took the ferry to Halifax once and the trip stole my memory. As I stood out on the deck and felt the spray cold on my face it felt like hands were reaching up out of the frigid choppy waters to unravel me like thread, leaving me salty and clear. Absolved.

Let us destroy the Martello Tower. Destroy it again and watch them build it back every year, growing more determined to catch us. Growing craftier, subtler, causing all our friendships to falter under the weight of mistrust and betrayals, until only you and I are left. We both know we are too few, and too poorly equipped to keep the rebellion going. We try anyway and are caught. The prosecutor demands that we hang, one before the other. Instead we escape, and drown in the attempt, swimming from the island fortress to a land we imagine but know nothing about, except that we know it is hopelessly far away.

I know where the tunnel entrances are, beneath the Citadel and the Signal Station. They are flooded and murky and icy. They are dangerous and perfect. If you can show me something better, then I am yours.

Have you ever met an old ex-pat in a foreign country, a refugee of lost love and a prospector of new chases?

I am trying new forms. I am thinking of dropping computer type for handwriting. I am going to work on this for the next few episodes, and see where it goes.

But no one counts the hours or the years. There are no seasons, the days are unchanging. Nothing dies out, nothing freezes over—not the mosquitos, not the refuse in the river beds. Everywhere we look we find the litter of surplus, the riot of vegetation, the overgrowth of humanity spilling out, as if God’s thermometer has snapped apart over the streets and its mercury dots are the motorcycles.

Five men sit under a sheet metal screen, quiet as a constellation. They are waiting. They are blank with waiting, waiting for anything to happen. The hours pass uncounted, their trivia falling into the gutters with the rest of it, with the wastes of humanity.

This peace is mystic, ancient and crushing. They say never to add music to what silence has said best, but this is a peace I want to shatter with a chord. And you—with you I want to rouse the street, not to prayer but to life. I want us to inspire the roofs to lift and the vines to tumble, the city to erupt like the volcanos that surround it, leaving gardens in the craters and love letters in the igneous pillars.

Tonight, love, I want us to gather up and organize. For tomorrow before dawn, we storm the mosques, we fill them and spill out of their grounds, and like a choir of thousands, we sing through their megaphones. Tomorrow we will make an instrument of them, the greatest ever built, the throat of Jakarta, a resonance that will rise into the sky and fall onto our heads, a celestial finger that, touching our foreheads, will lift us to our feet for sunrise.

Some people think ideas are hard to come by. If only they were.

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?