I saw a woman beckoning to a cat in an alley on the way home. I wanted to take a picture. Have you ever been in a situation that created a strong longing, a strong tension?

So I printed my old stories and cut them into pieces. I shuffled the small ones and folded those large enough into airplanes, doves and cranes. I assembled tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons with the fragments and rolled them together as dice. I wrote the parts facing up, and in the logic of seventy waking hours they formed like a hallucination, like the patterns hidden in those books you look at out of focus. On second reading, none of it made sense. None of my ideas do.

What I want is a collision. I want what comes out of the large hadron collider. I want what this city has, a skyline with the remnants of centuries rammed together, an original text with red editing between the lines. I want imperfections waiting to be scratched out, reflections and shadows falling onto the neighbours. I want a street of people who are incoherent in their passing, who are so far apart from each other that you can pluck at those distances like on the strings of a cello. I want so much competing music that there are accidental melodies in the clashing. I want them to last only so long, then veer away again to noise. I want you—the whispers I hear just barely above the crashing of your colours, smells and movement—a conversation left unsaid but glimpsed at in the veering apart of topics. I want the near miss, what can’t be captured yet, and when the dream is done, the only part that lingers.

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?

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?

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

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.

Happy New Year.

Have you ever felt like you were being asked to make decisions about your future with no information you trusted and no idea what your future self would want?

I have been grounded by fear. Any one of us could be the terrorist. And though we fight against the extremes of opinion and tactics, isn’t it delicious how the mainstream, the everyday commute, the engineered food and plastic computer are killing us? It is a quicksand, to struggle against it just swallows us faster.

All I want today is to turn the noise off, sink into a couch and play music neither of us has ever heard. I want to consign the cynicism of the world to others, and simply walk with you a while. I want to stay up all night making stories for you and forgetting them. I want a rebellion of the one real friend versus the eight hundred, of the private moment versus the public, of the things loved and forgotten against the clung-to, of the sensed and felt versus the reported.

I want to get to know you through the music you love, the books that have changed you, through your most fleeting and foolish fantasies, and through my own five senses. I want to know the you who has stayed up too late, gotten too drunk, indulged in too many daydreams out loud, and is not worried about how she comes off. When the end comes, I promise I will not care exactly where we all went wrong.

It’s the longest night of the year where I live in the northern hemisphere. Do you ever go out to watch meteor showers, stare at the sky until you see a streak? Have you ever cast a wish, then realized you could make it come true?