seven forgetting / letters

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Trinity / 16 July to 15 August

Dear Jillison,

Let’s start over. Let’s somewhere maybe we can agree: every creation story involves water.

I miss you. Eight blackouts in four days.

Shipwreck’s here and sometimes the shoreline already looks like it’s been struck through, another storm of white noise in a waiting room.

—

But not always. Sometimes my lungs are bent upward and blushing and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

I tell myself, this time, on this continent, and just put another tomorrow away and then another tomorrow away.

I tell myself, it doesn’t matter the difference, all diaries are the same day.

—

Hurricane / 16 September to 15 October

Dear Jillison,

No one ever thinks about how you need to stop when you want to be in a place. Deceleration is often crucially ignored or overlooked.

I wonder how your days are, what sort of materials and fabric have grown too loud, what shapes you sleep in when the sky is quieting down and the landscape is a surrendering thing.

—

Every object in our solar system operates/orbits on a relatively flat plane because it was all formed from the same original stellar accretion disk 4-5 billion years ago.

Maybe this just one defensive posture against peaks and valleys. Just a deep flat line of naive enthusiasm, infected by fragments with varying levels of success.

Nevermind the the vanishings, the empty lenses you expected me to forget.

It may be true that the earth is flatter than we ever gave it credit for.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Do you remember: You kept telling me how unreliable eyewitness memory could be.

You said, don’t try to tell me you don’t know me by now. I set my watch just to tick in time with your pulse.

—

It’s hard when your senses are ready for everything next, and the rest still resists, like cellophane wrapped too tightly over a windowsill.

But still. Things might not get worse. We might start having to define ourselves differently. Have you considered that yet?

What then? What kind of ghost, what kind of hiding in the attic, what kind of forgiveness and future potentials?

It’s there. Just a beginning, solutions ankle deep, birth marksmanship.

—

Jillison, I don’t know how to say it honestly. I can only say it honestly.

It was real for me. It was real for me. Is there really any point in telling someone on hormone replacement therapy, “no hard feelings.”

Come home. Come home?

—

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

In the men’s bathroom in the office building I’ve been working at, I listen to old men straining to shit while I do my brows in the mirror.

I am so incredibly embarrassed by my face.

Just keep hoping, maybe by the next room, maybe by the next room.

Time then, is it always a form of anticipation? I am still slow to outgrow the tyranny of framing attention this way.

—

On the unreality of time, this multiverse, etc:

Shotgun surgery? Consciousness causes collapse? I keep feeling something terrible is about to happen.

I gotta get better at making fun of myself. Do you miss me? It’s all collapsing.

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”

― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 1936.

—

Manhattan / 15 April to 15 May

Dear Jillison,

Here is what you told me once: There are only a very few basic parameters contribute to what makes a face attractive.

Averaging. Symmetry. Effects of hormones. Our wounds are just geography.

Four years on and I remain your unthought known, I remained dimly off limits, barred from the conscious minds of most people.

Especially you?

—

Cupio dissolvi. Literally, I wish to be dissolved.

The phrase has acquired more secular and profane meanings and uses, expressing such concepts as the rejection of existence and the masochistic desire for self-destruction.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Jillison,

“It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993

—

Julin / 15 June to 15 July

Jillison,

There are seven types of forgetting.

annulment
repressive erasure
prescriptive forgetting
planned obsolescence
structural amnesia
formation of new identity
humiliated silence.

in the philosophy of fault lines / hospital 9

—

Jillison. What contours now are clearer than what came before?

You’ve been drinking all night (and day). Still repeating to me the same secret you can’t (won) t tell anyone else. Plague water still your only map of nothing to say.

Latitude. Longitude. Center of your eye like a compass screaming at me.

Orbital floor fractures were investigated and described by MacKenzie in Paris in 1844 and the term blow out fracture was coined in 1957 by Smith & Regan, who were investigating injuries to the orbit and resultant inferior rectus entrapment, by placing a hurling ball on cadaverous orbits and striking it with a mallet.

—

You just want to ignore as much as you can. Go on and on about black me out weather, mistrust, language backing up into empty space. Saying to me over and over, I don’t ever want this or that to be us.

I remember you Jillison. Awake with your maps, north and blind, south and unable to breathe. Weak and shivered thin, diet and stress interchangeable, terrified of cracks in the hide.

Jillison, consciousness causes collapse. We are here now. Can’t make a map of anywhere else.

—

Still puking? Jillison. You said it wasn’t going to be same (again).

Mapskin creased over and over. Kept blaming it on the answer you couldn’t become.

Like writing you meant I owed you, an obligation (gesture) toward understanding, certainty, elimination of possibilities. An identity held, at least, temporarily.

But it was all a cartography of illusion points, Jillison. An embarrassment, in every direction. Jillison, I wanted an answer from you instead.

I wanted you tell me (just once), there’s a reason you are here. There’s a reason we stay here.

outline tectonic / topics of concern / letters

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Grable / 16 October to 15 November

Dear Jillison,

I want to be vulnerable with you.

Most interactions are either transactional or performative. We’re too self-conscious to listen. We’re thinking about what we’ll say next or how we’re being perceived.

All the posturing destroys any chance for a genuine connection.

—

A question worth asking: If you looked into the world’s most honest mirror, what would you see?

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night, 1962

Maybe I should stop going into the men’s bathroom.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Causality is a common lie. We only believe in it because our brains evolved for it: Tool making implies a world of causality. This action leads to this result: a very direct illusion.

You used to repeat yourself. You told me over and over.

This weeks theme is garbage gray. The goal is to pay attention to the illusions, knowing full well your brain is complicit in constructing them.

Possible theme: fragments are existentially valuable. Inherently valuable.

“The movement of animals closely resembles in many ways the random walks of dust particles in a fluid.”

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

Now the loneliness was evenly mixed with the air. Settled like pollen and dust on table chair and dishes. Thin little lines lay under your eyelids.

When you were a child, what did you think happened after you die? When did you start thinking about death at all?

I tried to remember the phantom limb of where we’ve been. Maybe there once was a room where I knew what to do with months like these.

—

Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

Do laundry. Go to work. Order/pickup medication. Pack what you own. Find a temporary place to live

No money for concealer or caffeine. Reschedule face hair removal appointment for when you might have money. Read an old story.

Move? Publish a book? Get arrested? Maybe throw up again?

Be kind to yourself. Talk to friends. Fuck dissociation. Wear what you have. No makeup necessary. Fuck dysphoria, Go into world. Listen. Laugh at yourself. Actually make the trip to get your pills. Be kind. Get a good night sleep. Write.

—

Confession: I have noticed this violent masculinity to our writing. Short clipped sentences Too much force put on the period and line break.

The only form I trust are fragments. What possible problems could this cause in our relationship? In all relationships?

There’s got to be a lot more change in my life. Let’s start with the way I write / think / collect / obliterate information.

–continuous omissions / distortions

–copying always / scavenging others

–entirely broken as a generative machine

–trash collector / plagiarist

Shortcuts, cheats, so many breaks. I collect scraps all week, just to leave them out.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

“The map is not the territory…”

Positive shame versus problematic shame. I tend toward the latter. Internalize. Over-personalize. Ignore external conditions and chance and circumstance. I catastrophize. I feel like I can’t change things, I lock in a spiral, I withdraw myself from others.

Habit loops contain three parts. Queue (Trigger). Behavior. Reward.

A lot of addictive and destructive behavior may be caused by unacknowledged shame. Concentric circles of denial and absence.

—

We are so reliant upon the human face to read/understand intention and motivation, the face is a communication array.

A lot of gimmicks, too many gimmicks. The mask is an ancient performative tool.

It is easy to become sentimental. It is easy to make poetic promises. You are right to see these tendencies for what they are: flawed, human.

—

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

― Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.

a constellation of knives / afterlife 2

—

And medical knives in Midheaven too, even if Jillison said it was all still preventable.

It only had to be a reminder some form of surgery coming. An equivalent guilt. They told us possible risks, radiation therapy, more possible risks and a third of the horoscope alone.

They said accidental catastrophe, including carcinoma, faster than average speed.

Another puncture passed through the undercurrent of your face. A pain exhibit. Like a constellation killed in slow motion. Almost even carelessly.

—

You said you would use whatever your had left. Lost comets, lines of advantage, sympathetic or contagious magic.

The discussion was over before it began. Just another reminder of all the things I never learned how to talk about with you.

transfinite rift theory / letters

Hurricane / 16 September to 15 October

Dear Jillison,

You’ve fallen for this word “afterlife” how many times now? I’m not sure what it is supposed to mean? What do you think you’re giving a name or order to? I knew who you were from fault line’s first lie.

Hollow born. Dead end new daughter. Do you remember what I told you when we met? Hangwire. Hiding place.

Ignore the rest of them, Jillison. Erasures scratched aside until there was only one left to spell.

—

Hypothesis over. After all that empty digging, numberless and unnameable. Fault line fractured open and filled to close again. On and on, repetition like a map of mistakes and regret.

Should I just have left you to chance? Left us to chance? Like another decade of disassociation would have allowed us to dissolve together, like these continents would always just be cloudforms you sketched on a page. Jillison, no.

Jillison, if I had told you the truth back then. What I wanted was simple.

Jillison, I wanted us to die there as long as it took. Hangwire. Hiding place.

What I wanted from you was simple: same body, shape of a void.

—

I’ve told you I’ve been working toward an afterlife to begin. Have you ever belonged to one before? I’ve been to one, just one. You know you don’t have to leave them quietly or all at once Jillison. Let them stare. Let them.

If it all went nowhere, if a rift opened without anyone knowing you well.

Jillison. I remember knives and knives under the bed, I remember hiding as dead as I could. It was another fucking excuse and then another one and I’m tired of them. How can’t you tell they are too?

Listen to me. Afterlife is only once. It is not a trauma management strategy. Symptoms are transfinite: total body deafness, desks empty and covered in skin, senses no longer separated by crash site and wreckage and cost of remains.The outcome is an obvious one, Jillison.

What’s left for us now then? An explanation won’t really help me. It certainly won’t help you.

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974..

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Trinity / 16 July to 15 August

Dear Jillison,

Listen. Seven continents and seventy attempts. Crashed so many times, I hope you remember that past too. If you think you have an afterlife now? Prove it.

Yes. Jillison. I told you from fault lines first lie. Make it simple. Almost childish, unbalanced, a diary of a missing body (story, plot, character) and the limits of disassociation in its place.

Do you need a list of leftover content? An entire encyclopedia of dysphoria? How much needs to be lyrical, blind to which outlines? Jillison, none of what you’re doing is remotely new.

—

Confused. Overwhelmed. Scared. Avoiding intimacy. Embarrassed. Distant. Cold. I know you don’t want me to say your name here: (want versus want). You won’t.

Do you understand what that means Jiillison, we are kept together or not all, either way. There is no pretense left for you to repeat. Keep your eyes on us instead.

Called yourself a scavenger’s daughter, dressed your hands in fossils and scales and feathers and skin, like there was such a thing as evolution at an evacuation site, like shrinking yourself into a smaller grave and then a smaller grave would help them see you honestly.

Mapped the same afterlife forwards and backwards, always as if our fault lines would fracture together at the end. As if, as if, as if.

Fearful, that is how I would describe you. That would be my word for you.

—

Jillison, I wanted to write these letters even plainer you know. Like all that mattered was a repetition of simple pieces (pitch-blind and against meaning). As if language wasn’t there at all. As if it wasn’t always a form of violence replaced.

Tell the story of where I found you last. Afterlife wasn’t ever supposed to mean anything more than that.