Circles (multiple)

By Alice Nilsson

This piece is part of Love-letters, a collection of digital works collated by guest curator Jess Hewett. Love-letters considers the possibility of love-letters as a mode of online writing that can escape problems of solipsism in girlblogging. This release offers love-letters as a collaborative assemblage of desire beyond any one given subject, dwelling on Deleuze’s provocation that “all writing is a love-letter”.

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Alice Nilsson is a writer and performer working on Gadigal land. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Format, Sister Gallery, and Alpha House, and published in Writing from Below, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Philosophy, Politics and Critique. She is a PhD Cendidate at University of New South Wales working on Jean Hyppolite, and runs the performance and event series Roberte.

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I met you in autumn a year ago, I remember this scent so well, the only one you had. You had me smell you, I asked what fragrance. ‚Byredo‘, ‚But which one‘, ‚Byredo‘. You smell me, ‚What fragrance‘, ‚Serge Lutens‘, ‚But which one‘, ‚Serge Lutens‘. We are still entangled, for better or

for worse, the entangling became deeper, despite protests (however erroneous). I get ready, after going back to sleep you roused me from (you hadn’t slept yet), I brush my teeth, no sign of your temporary roommate, the smell of coffee still lingers from the kitchen. I put the clothes you picked for my shoot in my bag, I put on the shirt of yours I wore last night, still smelling of spilt gin, and the water you splashed on me in the club bathroom. I only wore the pants you chose, I tried the shirt after I left and I felt like I needed to crawl out of my skin. I still have 15 minutes till I need to leave, I crawl back into bed, you roll over and pull me closer, I think about no-showing, I don’t want to leave your arms. I book an uber after saying I never want to leave, I have no perfume, they’re in my other bags. I look up at your vanity, I pick the one of your year of birth, it’s down to its last drops but I manage my usual routine, one left, one right, front and back, one left, one right, no friction to to minimise thermic effect. I pick up your shirt two weeks later, the club stamp is imprinted on the back from your arm around my waist, I smell the collar, you’re still there.

***

I saw ‘I’ today, idk if it’s her Virgo stellium or if she doesn’t ‘get it’. She’s my astrology wife, so I feel she should. I think her virgoan nature just cuts through it more than my Virgo rising ever would. Chi chi gets it, but I think it’s because we both write. We know how these things go, they fuel us.

When I was with ‘I’ she was (still) really annoyed at you for that evening. I never was. I just had a pit in my stomach when I realised it wasn’t S behind me and until ‘I’, Chi chi, and myself went to the bathroom to debrief; until I got more drinks in me. Chi chi said ‘I’ was being a Miranda then, her a ‘Chamantha’, I’m always Carrie in this dynamic. You know I’m Carrie in our dynamic—it’s even a running joke between us.

Idk, I get what ‘I’ says, but I think she misses something. This isn’t about a torturous attempt to get more written, there’s something that pulls us back together. Astrologically that makes sense; the mutual 12th and 8th house synastry. I think about all those pop astrologers on TikTok, and all the people desperate to know if the planet or house person feels it more because they want some consolation that their suffering is being mirrored in the other person’s psyche. Given our synastry is mutual in those accursed houses (as the pop astrologers would label them), it doesn’t really matter. Whatever the house person feels, whatever the planet person feels, we both feel it—despite it being differentiated by planet and sign.

Sometimes it feels like I don’t know how you feel, and then other times it’s so obvious it’s blinding. This makes sense for the 12th house. To everyone else it’s so obvious—they’ve told me multiple times. Chi chi’s seen the most, so I take her word for it more than ‘I’s. ‘I’ would say

that it doesn’t matter your feelings, that some of the ways you treat me don’t excuse the other actions. You said you’ve acted in less than ideal ways, but you keep coming back, I keep letting you in. Idk why but I’ll keep letting it happen, it’s so fun, you’re so fun, we’re so fun.

I guess I don’t make it any better, augmenting it by calling you my wife to people, in front of you and not. Especially after how I got annoyed that you were treating me like your girlfriend without having such a conversation. I told you that conversation needed to happen because I didn’t want to hurt you by fucking other people.

That was the biggest break we had really, any other breaks—except the most recent—weren’t really breaks or changes in how we functioned. We still saw each other, still got with each other. Perhaps we didn’t exchange I love you’s in that first non-break, but it resumed pretty quickly after. I think about that weekend. The one ‘I’ is still annoyed about, I don’t know if it was the first time since that big break that we said I love you again. I’d been on guard. I didn’t really know what to expect. We went on like nothing really had happened. We haven’t really talked about that break, we talked about the week long one a few after. I guess it might have been the first time since then that we phrased it exactly like that. You had said it in other words since we got back together (you won’t admit we’re back together or that we ever were).

I went shopping today. I decided after you left for work from mine that I would get you a Christmas present. I ended up spending more money on myself than on you, or anyone else. (In my defense, biting you so much has meant none of my pants fit). I got home from drinks and realised I went to buy your present in my shirt of your birthday twin. I’m writing with your present in my arms because I’ve missed you, despite it only being three or so days. I think I miss you more because I know I can’t just call you up to come over. It’s the same with Chi Chi and ‘I’, we’re all out of the city. Our inability makes us miss everyone more.

I had already made my mind up as to what I was getting you before I even left, but still I had to browse incase there was something better. It was either Paddington or a mouse. Maybe it’s because mice are seen as too unhygienic for children, but there’s no decent size mouse plushes at all. A dog would be too similar to Little Fang for it to be a good present from me. Same with Miffy, she’s too ‘me’, because I’m bunny, for it to be good for you. If there was a mouse for you, Mausi, it would have been too perfect, so it had to be Paddington.

So he’s in my arms right now. I think about the shirt you took without telling me on Monday, how you wore it to your work dinner. Was the ‘It was meant to be!’ In our dms about us? The 12th house fogs it. Chi chi says it obviously meant something—you taking my shirt and wearing it that is. I noticed today you left your charger here, I still haven’t told you. When I told T about the shirt he said ‘that’s not a situationship, that’s your girlfriend’. That’s a constant that seems to run through what everyone says—something we seem to dance around. It’s why ‘I’ says how we act is insane. You putting on my favourite song that we listen to and sweeping me away from everyone to dance in each others arms in the half-empty restaurant while kissing and saying we love each other. Like the ‘we’re in love with each other but it will never work’—I still havent gotten an answer to that, yet. Everyone else getting a shared uber home while you whisk me

away into the night, only quick goodbyes exchanged. The will-they-wont-they is kinda insane to everyone else, but it’s fun, it keeps me on my toes, it’s 12th house incarnate.

It’s beautiful, it’s us.

***

I return to this days later. I had a date last night. I didn’t feel bad about it, I have one tomorrow as well. As I write you message me, I haven’t messaged you in days, I’ve been too busy. Sitting in the stillness seems to call you towards me. I think about how manifestation is just the most extreme form of subjective idealism (or more aptly, solipsism), but they don’t get that. There’s no need to back everything up with quantum science if everything is your mind. I could make Democritus or empedokles’ naturphilosophies real if I thought hard enough. O said I’ve thought hard enough, that I manifested you from situationship to girlfriend. It makes my thoughts waver. The cardinal sin of tiktokers. I sat in the stillness until it happened, not enough empirical evidence for me.

I remember your name, not itself, but all those pieces of paper; under my pillow, that have fallen into the drawers beneath, in my shoes. How the first night you came to mine I had—-in front of Chi chi—taken every single piece that you might find and binned them. The next morning I realised one sat beneath water on my window sill. Drinking the water thinking about how you said ‘I love you’.

In the water I see my thigh, I cant make out ‘I fkn hate u’ anymore, only I H E U. It’s not really true, just the stress of everything else the last few weeks. Just ‘WRSHP DBL TME’—which is embarrassing but you won’t get it—and the rest of it. I don’t know if you saw it on Saturday, or

Sunday, or Monday. It would be embarrassing; probably not as embarrassing as us being drunk at dinner—at least none of them heard us say ‘I love you’ while dancing. I think about telling Chi Chi you messaged, another cardinal sin according to TikTok. I type out the message and delete it. It’s fine; You’ll be under my foot when I’m dancing tonight.

***

Je sors ce soir; nous sommes sorties ce soir. You met M tonight. I don’t know if he clocked who you were. I think about C & C. How in BUTT she said how she just writes about fucking C now, how they’ve been on and off for three years or so. I look at our texts, my thoughts waver, I shut it up. You missed G play my favourite song of his. ‘Feel like I’m drowning in yr arms/ And I can’t find the words you want/ Sometimes it’s not the right time/ And I’m not in my right mind’. it’s fine, you were tired—I remember kissing you goodbye as you left, I remember us fucking and saying ‘I love you (too)’.

***

I find the letter-as-form hard to externalise. Once you insert abstraction it becomes something else; it’s formal qualities change. I keep rereading over this because I send it to people, I’ll send

it to EIAG when Chi chi is editing. When I would journal even using the personal pronoun ‘I’ felt hard, it took a while, then I escaped into poetry to abstract more. Even this section is a futile attempt to evade ascribing the ‘I’ to ‘myself’. Even though you probably won’t read this, or see what comes out of this, it feels like you can read my mind. It sometimes feels like I can read yours too.

Even in messages I could be read as cryptic, I don’t think my actions towards you are, or yours to mine are. But when your words don’t match your actions, it’s disorienting . It’s more disorienting given it’s the opposite of the usual cases. It’s like we’re in our own secret garden when we’re alone or around strangers, one where the truth is revealed so blindingly.

I said to J last night I’m leaving any conversations till when we’re both back in town. I’ve decided it won’t be like last time a similar conversation happened. I’ll probably evade seriousness, like how you evade everything people notice about us. I wrote the other week about how you always swoop in at the strangest times. You did it when J and I stopped going on dates, you did it at 2am after SK and I saw Nosferatu. I did it yesterday. I try to imagine how the night would have gone if J wasn’t there, and if you weren’t tired. I can predict it, so, so easily.

Is this the only way I can not be cryptic when I’m sober? To continue writing, put it places, and not care if you find it. I think about hiding notes in your apartment next time I’m there, like those pieces of paper in my shoes. I don’t know if there’s any under my pillow, I think if you had found

any last week it would have been a drama. The ones with blood are definitely gone. I imagine you finding them, under your pillow, in your books, K finding one in the kitchen drawers. Would you find them? Like I found the nail I lost that first night in your living room four months later? Would I be gone by then? Would I recieve a message asking about it while in Germany or France? You would have noticed everything in the performance—despite the abstraction. You notice and don’t say. My thoughts waver, I have to shut it up.

***

I hardly post on Twitter anymore. It went from Twitter, to journal, to whatever this is. I posted bits of this there, and photos of us. A called us cute and said our love is too intense, I said I should tell you that to freak you out. She was gagged that we still aren’t a labelled thing, but that’s also because she knows it all—like Chi chi, O, and ‘I’. Her exact words were ‘how the fuck is this still going?’, ‘how is it still up in the air. I just read about aversion houses, how the 12th, 8th, 6th, and 2nd can’t be seen by the 1st. I feel sad, the 12th always makes me sad, but even more that your Luminary is there. I feel I can see your sun, more than your moon, but that’s because you can’t see your moon yourself, like I can’t see my soul’s mission, or how to take action.

***

You text me, unprompted, twice today. I still haven’t started packing, or cleaning, I haven’t eaten today. I keep thinking about you, looking at the photos I’ve taken, the way you look at me in those photos, the way you kiss me, how you look at me.

***

I’m watching Girls, the wedding episode. You haven’t watched but I won’t explain. I tried to get you to watch it with me the day before my birthday. I text Chi chi, saying why would that be something I ended up in with you. I still haven’t started packing, or cleaning. I finally ate. I keep adding to this, I feel like it’s getting worse as it expands. I don’t know if there’s any catharsis, or expelling of anything—other than the urge that comes with writing. I know everything I need to do today, but I still haven’t done it. I called Jess today, I said I feel like I’ve been the universal of someone who does nothing today. I just looked at my phone, I masturbated three times, I did amyl, I read an article on the length of medieval peasant Christmas festivities. J told me I need to make sure I’m not hurting the other people I’m seeing; I think the only way they’d get hurt is if they assumed I wasn’t seeing anyone else which is on them.

I try to think about what the next performance will be. There needs to be abstraction, everything I’ve been writing has been about you. If I do one next week, it will be about you too.

I think about putting everything I’ve written about you in one document and sending it to you on New Year’s Eve. Poems, journal entries, performance writing, messages wouldn’t work. An encyclopedia of everything I’ve externalised about you. Reconstructed accounts of the debrief calls in Ubers home from yours. From yours to mine was the my most traveled route on Didi this year. 23 times, there’s definitely more, times I got trains, times I went else where. That only leaves 29 weeks of the entire year that weren’t accounted for, only 12 weeks unaccounted from when we met to new years. I did the math and if it was just once a week since we met it would only be 35 on Christmas. The thought that the data had a collection cut off makes it even more surreal. It’s 8, I still haven’t started packing.

***

It’s 11. I finally had a shower, but I sat under the cold water for an hour. I’ve dumped everything from my bag onto my bed. The only things I’ve packed properly are the books for work. I think the time crunch makes me act.

It’s now 12, I’ll get shit done, but I haven’t been able to because I keep thinking about the things you’ve said. They are burned into me. I notice your initials are still etched on my torso from weeks ago. They come out when I waver. Words of yours that appear throughout my writing. Like timestamps so I can remember exactly where they fall. I’ve gotten to a place where I can deal with how we are, but sometimes I slip back into my old self. I want to have a conversation about it, but like that conversation before, I worry you’ll freak out. I’ll have to keep quiet till we’re together next, probably in two weeks or so. I know if you pull away because of it you will be back, because of how it’s been before. How we came back and you said we connect so well but our lives don’t fit, then when I asked later why you said no we do, then how you’ll wait for me (there’s no waiting required), hypotheticals about our future children even though we’ve both said we don’t want any, how kids wouldn’t allow us to live the lives we want, how you said to someone in front of me that were in love but it won’t work, how he asked me when you were out

of the room about it and I tried to evade the question by just saying yeah she’s in love with me, then when he pressed I told him I love you, how apparently when I was black out I held a mirror to you and rattled off the things you’ve said to me, how you said you were upset we didn’t see big wett together because we weren’t talking, how I swear my ugly loud crying while puking in my bathroom manifested you texting me, how I asked everyone at dinner what they thought of my wife, how you keep assuming I’m involved in our plans without asking if I’m free, how you took my shirt without asking, how you asked me to bring you a cap that I’d be fine missing for a few weeks, how only until recently has my cutting been about you, how I can keep listing things off but it won’t change that I love you.

It’s now 12:12, I think I’m done. I’ll pack now.

***

I pull the cards because I didn’t like his determinism. Energies aren’t set, they respond to action, I think if anything our energies that night pointed towards the ones I pulled before and after.

I don’t know why I couldn’t do it, maybe it’s why I couldn’t respond when you asked how I want you to be there for me. I’d even set everything up, the clothes—your clothes I’ve been wearing—incase I freaked out and called an ambulance, I’d even showered and brushed my hair so I wouldn’t look like a mess. I think part of me knew even if I could get deep enough I’d try and save myself somehow. It would be easier with heroin, but even when I’ve went to I would just cry and get high instead. Even the new blade was too blunt to get anywhere without force, and my tolerance too low.

You seem to want me to open up to you, but we both refuse. I could give you all my writing from the past year and it would tell you enough. I can tell how it would go, it would be like you reading my book before I tour it to your city. I know there’s a pull between us, you slowly ever so slowly keep revealing it. I don’t know if it would push you away, but it would give you an understanding of truly how much you affect me.

I fear if I ask for the clarity I desire, it will end up like our first (proper) breakup, but also then I know exactly how it will go. Neither of us have changed, really, we’ve fallen further into each other. The words might have changed slightly, but they convey exactly what we both know, deeper than either of us had uttered before. I know we’re a romance, but you saying it soothes me, even if it’s only when we’re drinking. Neither of us has changed, we still act exactly how we did before, but we’ve settled into it, this settling has made it deeper, now you assume I’m involved in plans, or you’re in mine without asking, even when I say 3 and not 4. These assumptions let on more than you assume. It’s not that I wouldn’t want you there in the wilderness, but I’ll need to be treated better to let you cross that threshold.

***

I keep rewriting this, I cannot tell if the externalisation makes me think it doesn’t achieve what I’ve subconsciously set out to do, or if I just keep needing to say more, in different words, which circle around the same statements. Statements I haven’t made to you for reasons which flow against everything I say about love. Time value or at least the illusion of it stops these statements too. I’d rather sit in this well of uncertainty than let the absolute cut like a knife.

I remember the time you stayed at mine. I was so embarrassed, you kept reassuring me there’s nothing wrong. I know exactly why everything was the way it was, the shit I refuse to tell you about, even now you don’t know the extent of it. That’s why I had to sneak into my room while you watched tv, to hide every blood stained thing. I haven’t been able to get out of my bed for weeks other than for excuses to drink and to keep up appearances so it’s not any better. I think about telling you this, perhaps tonight, but it feels like I will dig myself into something I regret. It’s not just because despite our dynamic being so damaging it’s so fun, I enjoy it in all its facets, even those that hurt me. It just adds to it. [Edit?]

I planned to write a letter, unsent or not, then the stars told me to. I had written three before, one short, one long, one a poem. I’ve arrived at the point where I know, even if they stay unread (by you or by others), they will end up somewhere. Writing these feels like stretching my skin like canvas, the abstraction, the lack of naming, the avoidance of everything means it is the opposite of ripping my skin off, but as it stretches it becomes thin, tiny splits occur, when you look carefully enough you see more than just the sound of a heartbeat in someone’s chest.

My chest feels tight as I write, I fear that the past week hasn’t ended. I read O’s piece I’m editing, the blood on the pillows, I stripped my bed after you left and realised we were sleeping in my old blood. Everything’s blunted and I can’t be bothered to open a new scalpel head. Everything arrives as the ‘I think’, it keeps folding into me, I couldn’t see the letter until I reopened it an hour ago. XXII

I don’t need anything, it’s just harder without everything. I can see my hipbones again, ‘plutôt crever’ across them. I can retract, but the materiality of flesh seems easier.

***

18:35

00:10

I think of the differand…. Maybe that’s the only way we can put it. No regime of signs can do justice to it. I missed your message by a quarter. I was too busy with them. My ride home was free, that’s what happens when you find those with institutional cred. I pull the Lyotard book off my shelf, or at least I plan to when I get there. I haven’t read it in years, since when I was in a different city. Phrases in dispute. ‘The question is to know whether, when one hears something that might resemble a call, one is held to be held by it. One can resists it or answer to it, but it will first have to be received as a call, rather than, for instance, as a fantasy. One must find

oneself laced in the position of addressee for a prescription (the request being a modality of prescription)’.

Obligation. I can’t tell the change of the text size, it all blurs. I lie on the grass, wanting the earth to consume me, no more gazes I can see, no more big othrrr. No more imposition of sense.

im speaking into my microphone to uuu do u get it? can u hear me? etch it into ur memory for me, all that you can make out, make me into a single layer of ur lifetime, ill emerge in 5 or 10 or 50 years, a significance only just registered, a word only uttered just now.

(did I tell u that? Do u remember what I told u? What u said to me? I don’t think u realised what the song was about, or u just picked parts to show how u feel. U remember so much, I think u tell me u don’t so I tell you again.)

Everything circles around the same point, differentiation is simply modal. Even the modes have modes, all these words about the finite circle around one determinate thing, D says all writing is an act of love, perhaps I love too many people, too many things, all these words r a phase space of our dynamic, they bleed off the page, some refuse to bleed onto the page, I had 10 minutes to stop myself bleeding and look presentable.

I walk through the park, I want to climb the wall, walk across it as the cars speed past. I miss(ed) you. Your name is a speculative name. One I refuse to write (I speak it nonetheless, in conversations, messages, calls). Our eye contact, different from those in the gallery M and I could reach, the echo of the room, ‘doesn’t the other or the stranger have all the traits of the Is it happening?’.

I say to JR we missed you, not that I care at this point. If evidence comes last the 3D doesn’t matter. I have to force myself to sleep, if the past days are any indication. Self-awareness is fine but…

I refuse to identify. Like how I refuse to name you. It’s probably because I haven’t seen you for weeks. It feels different, it don’t think it will feel the same as that break, maybe it will, how we went back like nothing had happened. We never really talked about that, about how the stars pulled us back together, how….

Language is where everything goes to die. Do I really believe that? I think meeting you meant I realised it, before my Saturn return which I thought would get me there. Perhaps it may fling me to the edges of the earth, away from you, away from anything that language cannot grasp.

I try to carve you into my skin, you don’t avoid representation but I wouldn’t want to do that to you. You’re there? Abstracted? Not like the last time, I had to represent you for the audience, or at least the mark(s) you left upon me. I think you exceed representation, but so does everything. All these words, the letters, why the letter? They become you, at least in my mind, the unwritten ones, the unsent texts, the marks unmarked, the propositions that don’t meet its form. The

commas I keep pressing to continue the sentence/////I meet everyone and I want you to meet them too. We operate in a formally different way but it reaches the what is happening. Opposites. I try not to be oppositional, at least to you, it’s protective, the way we function.

***

I wake up in the hospital to the notification: ‘Your parcel ´Rien’ has been delivered’. A second psychiatrist comes in about an hour later with a student. I don’t really care for it, I just need to leave and have been too exhausted from the mirtazapine they gave me to get up and ask a nurse. I answer his questions so I can get to mine: ‘Am I still scheduled or am I voluntary?’ It’s the second even though half asleep I told the other nurse I still want to an hero.

6 months ago I wrote ‘I want to read Rien’. I tell the psychiatrist I want a mirtazapine script and to leave, I ask them to also put me on the registration list for the closest thing they have to analysis. It takes about an hour, but I get my shit and walk to King Street. I see Schattenfroh, its too big, I won’t ever finish it. Jules book is there too, I don’t buy it, I send her a picture instead. I remember how she misread my tweet 2 years ago, how she thought at the time I was propositioning her, I let her though.

I get home, the house is how the cops left it. They left a glove on my coffee table, just like the disposable ones Jules wore while she fucked me, everything is signaling. I saw your name in a book title while I walked to get my script. Everything is signaling. I close the cupboard doors the cops left open. They’d taken just about everything from my bag and piled it while looking for my ID. The Phenomenology, that category theory book you gave me, my notebook with things about you.

I light a strip of papier d’Arménie that I bought for Roberte. P says it will be good to invest time, money, energy into it. I buy some more candles and candle holders for the first one. I read Rien in a night, I probably put it down about five times because I can’t concentrate. It’s not you, its not even me, I guess it could be an approximation of me once I’m stable. I don’t know if it could be an approximation of you.

I look at the shirt of yours I’m wearing, five dots of blood where I rebuttonned it after they fixed my arm at the hospital. The same number of texts I haven’t responded to from you. Everything is signaling.

***

21:45

While in the car yesterday, we drove passed a wall that had ‘secret garden’ painted on it. It broke through the fog—whether it has been medically induced or not I cannot discern.

—secret garden

—secret garden?

—secret garden… there’s no such thing as coincidences

I got most of my crying out on the concrete at Clovelly between trying to reread Cavailles. I didn’t end up swimming because I get scared of the depth sometimes. No coincidences. I said to Chi Chi that I had told J I ended up in the hospital.

—how did she take it?

—she was sad and then we hugged it out when we got out of the uber and she said —‘take care of yourself’

—‘Don’t worry I’m not going to kill myself tonight’

and she walked to hers from mine

I thought about telling you but I didn’t. I sent you an explanation and a Phoenix song instead.

***

02:30

I reread Ça Chie, ça baise to find something for the post. I think about all the dishonesty I’ve cultivated as a way not to get hurt, no fabrication, just a limit. It’s not omission if I don’t cross it, that line right there. It moves occasionally, it curves around certain statements, and cuts right through others. Every utterance i try to see how close can I get before running away, making asymptotic curves out of my breath.

Chi chi told me no more remembering, no more taking stock, no more accounts. That’s why I can’t stand Deleuze, all writing is a love letter, but all writing is a writing after even when it is a writing towards. It returns, even when it is changed, even when its end seems different to its beginning. For a week I’ve fought the urge to block your number, or scream down the phone, or end up back in the hospital, but the circle will arrive at its starting point, whether I know it or not.

***

22:30

There’s an ambulance on Marrickville road, about five minutes from where there was one last Tuesday. The medication the hospital gave me means there won’t be one there for a few months minimum. Shuffle puts telefono on again, I make it repeat; non poso vivere, troppo bisgono di te.

‘Nothing will enter memory, everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and th other imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction but only a line of flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new happiness?’ (D&G, ATP, 206-207)

The silhouette in the unit across from mine looks like you, I noticed this a week ago. Telefono still repeats in my ears, I sent it to you after breaking no contact because you upset me. The circle continues to return to those same points. my Anu Jakobson print fell from the wall after everyone left the reading, I’ll put it up now after half a week.

All I can think of are lines of flight, their inbetween, how you and I become imperceptible, how I try to efface my face, if I succeed in doing so. A certain facility arises from my body that signifies what is inside, outside of my words, though those words—those you don’t read—remove the face enough. Deleuze, quoting Fitzgerald, said enough: ‘In the end, nothing really had importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other’. The circle returns me, back to myself and you, changed, unchanged, for better or for worse. I look for the remaining hanging strips, I cannot find them while dancing, the lights in the unit across me turn off one by one.