What it Sounds Like (Letter to Self)

written in los angeles, ca after work.

Dear [REDACTED], 

I am having trouble connecting the fragments around me, where geometry was once a way of moving through the world. I mean, I can no longer say, with any definition.

In the garden outside, a small animal was making holes underground, disappearing roots.

Listening to Johnny practice the same composition on his keyboard each day, I lose the distinction between his sounds and the memory of my fingers on the keys. Lately things just are what they are, yet their concreteness is not grounding. The flowers outside are blush. The body circulates blood. Every day, details accumulate and remain empty at the same time, and that is the hardest thing about all of this—the way nothingness takes over as one sits waiting for the unknown. I am observing every small fluctuation of the body so anxiously, I cannot think of anything else. The fog that accompanies alignment is relentless.

In which suspension is a state of being, with no expiration date (how does one decide when to begin grieving?). In which tenderness is a point somewhere in the vast space between grief and hope.

I mean, I am trying to make my way through something, toward something. In the meantime my world does not know whether to expand or contract, as if I am straining to peer into a tiny telescope measured in nanometers. Instead of it being a comfort to have a world so small and all mine, it feels like I’ve forgotten something, like I’ve been forgotten.

The truth is I often feel awash in the marginalia of my own life. The idea has followed me around for its possessive plainness: an ongoing audio diary of ((               )). A record of ephemera, our most habitual wrinkles of air. Like a prism, I am aware that inside silence is merely the sounds we ignore—am I placating myself when I say those non-sounds carry a meaningful soundness of their own?

The reality, by comparison, looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. However, I have learned that if I am willing to be irrational, then I have the power and control over the idea that maybe all this barbarism and transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here.

xx

p.y.t