Tag: letters

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?

—

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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.

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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.

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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.

murder the wren days / letters

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Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

When I was little, still in the nowhere farmhouse, I used to press my palms of my hands against my closed eyes as hard as I could. 

I pressed and pressed until the discolored splotches and fractals showed up on the inside of my eyelids. 

I asked my parents if that’s what dreaming was.  Now I know the phenomena is called “prisoner’s cinema.”

Somehow I’m not surprised. 

—

The myth most commonly told to explain the festival is as follows; God wished to know who was the king of all birds so he set a challenge. The bird who flew highest and furthest would win. 

The birds all began together but they dropped out one by one until none were left but the great eagle. The eagle eventually grew tired and began to drop lower in the sky. 

At this point, the treacherous wren emerged from beneath the eagle’s wing to soar higher and further than all the others.

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Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

You told me a few times, storms provide anonymity.  Provide distraction. 

I never liked it when you would talk like that.

It was the day to commemorate the first killing of the winter king by the orphan children.  Capture’s Day. Hollow Born Day.  First Martyr’s Day.

We wore scars around our necks and short robes and women’s clothes, just trying to keep the wind from breaking us.

—

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Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning “the necessary changes having been made” or “once the necessary changes have been made.“

It is used in many countries to acknowledge that a comparison being made requires certain obvious alterations, which are left unstated.

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The tradition may also have been influenced by Scandinavian settlers during the Viking invasions of the 8th to 10th century.

Various associated legends exist, such as a wren being responsible for betraying soldiers who fought the Viking invaders by beating its wings on their shields, in the late 1st and early 2nd millennia, and for betraying the Christian martyr Saint Stephen, after whom the day is named.

This mythological association with treachery is a possible reason the bird was hunted by wrenboys on St. Stephen’s Day, or why a pagan sacrificial tradition was continued into Christian times.