48

I know, I know. I get distracted and come up with an excuse. I needed to clip my nails, didn’t I? The new year happens and is celebrated in scattered voices, all crunched down on the phone. In the quiet walk for a burrito, in the darkened alley passing someone else also speaking to some other place, our voices were pulled away. Fragmentation of the floor. What to do with the way it was always dissolving? To reach for the reaching, that ground which at times seems to be nothing more than a play of words, the belief in language, or a way of keeping the fear of falling at bay. In your apartment we talked about our changing beliefs in what an adequate goal for writing could be. No, writing won’t take it all down, but what, you asked, could we truly seek to do? Your goal, you explained, was to write one really good sentence. To be both concerned with it all and make one thing work right—or work beyond your grasp. I said that there has to be a reason to stay in this world, and that my struggle in articulation and its failures happens in that space. I’m infatuated with description and the possibility of what could be. A reason: to walk back down the thin line of steps before the sea, past the stones and the tree that leans toward the water. Each of my projects is an excuse to spend more time with the people I love. Everything is not endless. I want to be with you.