Have you ever suspected that the wrong factors might be holding a relationship together?

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

Pound wore a hoodie that day. No one wears a hoodie in the telecom district–no one who eats lunch on the plaza. At any rate, I did not sit next to him in order to sit next to him, I just sat there because that is where I always sit. I did, however, like his cheekbones and his eyes, how they pointed away as if he were singing.

“That’s a model V557,” I said when he took out his mobile phone. I don’t usually know how to start with people, but it worked: he turned to face me, calm and inviting. “I have the same model,” I explained, pulling mine out, “only it’s grey.”

He tapped his phone ever gently against mine. “They’re glad to meet,” he said.

Before he left, he kneeled, brushed the hair from his eyes, aimed his phone at me and snapped a picture. “What’s your number?”

I told him, and he sent me a message with my photo attached: How can a thing you see through cast a shadow? Easy. My office tower, right behind me in the photo, is made of glass. The important part of the message was his phone number.

After we had sex, every single time until we broke it off, he kissed the back of my neck. The first time, he asked, “Is Asterisk your real name?”

It would never occur to me to make up a name like that.

I always ask a couple how they met. The details are important. The beginning of a story mobilizes the rest. For example, Pound and I practically lived out our relationship in text messages. It makes sense because that is how it began.

We riffed like improv musicians. Pound is a musician anyway. Just like in music, we had long phrases and short, short pauses and long. We had sex with our phones and sent each other pictures of how the other saw it. I touched the lens to the headboard, leaving just enough light for a picture. I aimed back past my shoulder to get the side of his face. We kept silent and sent our noises in symbols. Honestly, it wasn’t the best sex.

The strange thing was how our phones started talking. I mean, they started talking independently. This disturbed me a lot. Now, I tried to figure out when that began, but I could never quite pinpoint it. Not even with Pound’s help. Not that he was any real help.

“What do you mean, you can’t remember whether you texted this?” I would ask. He could only shrug and squinch. Pound has no mind for details. It’s infuriating.

Before long, our phones were communicating more than we were. Some of their early messages read like jumbles of the messages Pound and I sent. Their semantics devolved from there until ninety percent of the text was just garbled alphanumerics and symbols. By the end, our phones sent nothing but data streams. I had to be careful to keep my phone off at all times except when I absolutely had to use it. Any time I left it on, it would stream constant, meaningless data. Pound was more careless. His phone ran up a three thousand dollar bill. I paid it off for him and made him cancel the account; this was the week before we broke up.

I decided it would be wise to cancel my own account, too. Still, somehow our phones kept at it. The only way to shut them up was to remove the batteries. I didn’t know what to do with them anymore, so they just sat on my bedside table, eviscerated. One morning I could not stand looking at them any more. I arced my head around to Pound and told him, “We have to get rid of them.” He looked at me like he wanted to say something.

There are a lot of unused maintenance rooms in the basement of my work building. I thought we would have to sneak in, but whatever Pound said to the maintenance foreman, it got us down there.

“Just give me a minute with them,” Pound asked while I waited at the door. I watched him put the batteries back in, and shove them under some equipment. I wonder if they still talk.

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.

What a decade. I am going to be spending New Year’s Eve holed up at home, I think, trying to figure out just what happened these past ten years.

Have you ever realized something that seemed pessimistic, except that it made you a better person?

A city is an aggregate, a statistical ensemble, it does not matter how random I am, there is a graph of how we shop, of when our lights go on. The traffic pulses, orderly, like the signals on a wire, and you stand across from me at the intersection, there, through the gaps between the cars—if they passed at thirty-two gaps per second, I could say you were in a film.

We pass each other ten thousand times a day and learn to never dwell. Next to you on the plane, I fantasized that it would crash, at least that we would think so. I imagined our introductions, your name, telling you I take pictures. If I had my camera out, I would take some then, honest shots the impact would obliterate.

This city burned to the ground. Maybe today the bomb goes off, it has been waiting in a skyscraper’s utility penthouse and the light from it is like ten thousand suns. Our shadows, all our shadows, look like chalk stains flaring out from the intersection where you and I are standing, we are in the fireball, it has caught the air itself on fire, evaporated the city core, sucked glowing embers high into the clouds and turned the two of us invisible.

The radioactive dust begins to settle, it lands on your arms and shoulders and on your head, and it is like the two of us have risen from it, a new species. We make a skin of ash, rubbing it in like charcoal sketches of ourselves.

We are mute, now, but then we always were, and as we wander the landscape after this apocalypse, there is always dust to trace in. You write that our stories are told with light and I write back, what I always wanted, most of all, was to hear you laugh.

I decided to try something different today. I’ve been playing with pastels, and my wind-up clock, which has been showing the same time for the past two years, was willing to sign a model release.

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.