oh no!

Sintra, Portugal

Jim Harrison, Barking

—Jules Joanne Gleeson, How Do Gender Transitions Happen?

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

That crazy drunken night I maneuvered you out into a field outside of Coachella—I’d never seen a sky so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives still were sprinkled with glistening white shells from the ancient seabed beneath us that receded long ago. Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows. —That suffocated, fearful look on your face. Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone tell me you died almost nine months ago. Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter that we cannot ever have the conversation that in nature and alive we never had. Now not ever. We have not spoken in years. I thought perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two broken-down old men, we wouldn’t give a damn, and find speech. When I tell you that all the years we were undergraduates I was madly in love with you you say you knew. I say I knew you knew. You say There was no place in nature we could meet. You say this as if you need me to admit something. No place in nature, given our natures. Or is this warning? I say what is happening now is happening only because one of us is dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us! Our words will be weirdly jolly. That light I now envy exists only on this page.

SCHEHERAZADE SATURDAY

— from "Letters to Milena", Franz Kafka [April, 1920]

Bound (1996)

Kyoto botanical gardens - the water looks like a night sky