It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth, to say an emptied mountain struck its hollowest note and sounded unlike anything else. I text the same three people every day, sometimes four. How fast that dream left me when I woke out of it, snorted up into a catalog of faces fastened with long and draping hair. Unrecognizably, I am thinking of something else. Not a dream or a short transparent reality like the outer bend of my eyes or a limping memory poking around the calendar for an approximate location. Something else. And I really don't feel I know enough to say what it is. Shouldn't a work of sufficient emotion optimize any morning into a cascade of murmuring strings that appear to fix the ground to an object vast enough to be in the continual distance? I knocked on that door once, and I think behind it was all spaghetti. Life's things do pile up, though I'm daily assured I can be driven into a normative clarity, wiping away thoughts like they'd accumulated on a windshield.

Andrew sent me a new story of his yesterday about an empty-handed search for a fabled painting of Guibert, its sole evidence of existence was an appearance in L'Homme au chapeau rouge, which I have not read. He later emailed me to clarify the search was fictional and the narrative cribbed from L'Homme. The story is beautiful, one of my favorites of his now. The image of never having been though still having, distinct and existent as anything else, a life, hangs clear and unguarded and doubles as a volume of forgetting one pages through while sitting up from bed or even walking to the kitchen maybe for coffee if I remembered to buy a bag of beans at the store yesterday.

[Brooklyn, 5/25/18]