The second of four close-ups on a larger picture. The first is found here.

The first of four close-ups on a larger picture. They’ll appear at five day intervals.

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?

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 met a person who talks like fireworks? He keeps speaking, excitedly, while I am following the trail of that one thought from five seconds ago, the other explosions all around it, some glowing on its smoke, until it is gone.

Happy St-Jean Baptiste Day, Montreal.

Have you ever been on the verge of both the opposite extremes?

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.

Have you ever come home after a long stay away? What was that like for you? Do you feel you have a home town?