61

This is the improvisational underside of some other conversation we were going to have but forgot about. Instead, it was an image of a page and the edge of your hand. Instead, an invitation to go to the cables within which our shared passages pass for data and pass under the whatever of content and containerization. We share under the banner of banality something so precious we can’t even name it—can’t bring it into the right folder or give it the right tag. We let it pass and so we let it go. We pass small notes between thousands of miles and years of time. We’re trying to find another excuse to put everything down and talk about heartbreak and a piece of the sky. We’re exhausted with the calculus of the application and the approach, our own bullshit we took on without even noticing. Re-opening the same document under a different name with a new heading, we moved the line from the end of the fourth paragraph to beginning of the third. Do you hear it, or is that just the sound of the space heater doing its thing from across the room? At some point the need to distinguish becomes indistinguishable from what we’re trying to get away from. There was a flurry of snow and all I could see was white butterflies from that summer pulling into the humid garage. I mean, there was a fluttering and I wanted to touch you. I read an account of the world we used to live in together and cried when the author said that home happened when we were twenty-three. It happened when we were twenty. What we have in sequence are our shared failures to make something of the afternoon and a blanket that makes up a small mountain range. Illegibility was the first awning we met under. Turning our bodies into questions always runs the risk of not being oriented toward each other. But what other choice is there?