Sitting naked on a pillow next to the space heater wondering if I have committed murder, and can it even be murder if you don’t know for sure if you’ve done it? Forgive them Father for they do not know what they do. That love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it. The mothers and the daughters and the dying, when we think of the future what we are thinking of is our children. It did not occur to me until recently that, if the choice is between killing you and killing my own babies (and that is, in fact, the choice), my greater responsibility is already to them.

I asked the daughter if she wanted to read the story or just look at the pictures, and she said, look at pictures, so we looked at them and said what they were, all the animals and the pink trees and purple trees and ladders and words, and she gives her love so freely, her mother says, but not to everyone. I went looking for Antarctica and found the beginning of time, the beginning of the new notime time, and somehow every movie I see and every concert I hear has a man dressed up in a tiger suit in it. I want that rapper’s tiger coat, I said, and my friend said he would back me up on that one. My fortune says I should reevaluate my plans for the future. My best friend says he cannot breathe. I buy plane tickets for an exorbitant price, I realize I cannot possibly use them, I don’t talk, I can’t say. I would kill you with my bare hands, I text, while sitting in a dining hall crying my eyes out and not eating the food I have gathered in a daze.

Time is the most precious thing you can have, her grandfather says. The rain. The new corset. In Quebec, tabernacle and chalice are swear words. The coincidences. The one I love so much I cannot speak to him anymore. And yet I brag about him, he made that, he did that, my best friend! I have already cried in front of so many people who don’t know me yet. There is a way in which imagining a certain future seems to prevent it from happening. There is a way in which imagining a certain future is the happening of it. To the one I may be beginning to love, I cannot shut up. You already killed me. I feel like my breath is gone I can’t breathe. I can’t believe.

The father has nightmares that someone is taking his daughter away, all night, every night. My cunt, there is no other word, is burning. But Antarctica. But the children. We are twirling around in circles with our scarves and our dresses fanning out. Ever since she was born I have never not been afraid. What is the point of doing it if you’re just going to half-ass it? This is it. This is your life. Next to having a baby, nothing matters. Why don’t we talk about the things that really matter? Death and love and intimate family relationships. Why am I so afraid that my emotion will cause you to have an emotion, that I will get inside, that I will impose?

Where did you go? Why aren’t you here? Why did you leave me? But I told you, I told you, this really wasn’t going to be okay. But I have to get more data, I have to write it up, I have to tell the story. I told only one friend about the time we both came just by holding hands. She said, that belongs in a book. Here it is. This is it. No more waiting until you can do it justice. You can’t, ever. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, that Eliot poem has been echoing in my head for weeks. How did you fail to notice that the world already ended? After the end of the world, there is another world.

The worst outcome is, you kill your opponent, better is he kills you, then, you kill each other, and best is everyone lives. But, then, I always preferred tragedy to comedy. In a tragedy, you kill each other. There is a way in which imagining a certain future causes it to happen.

Expectation. Forgive me.

I miss you when you are gone, and when you are near I miss you in anticipation of your next departure. There is no such thing as closeness. Objects can be no closer than they are, co-arisen and inseparable. Everything interpenetrates and yet I long to be penetrated, as if something is missing, as if something is lost. Who am I, if you do not know me? You ask me to write the answer on your face, yet you insist that it must be spoken, it must be in words. For a moment, before you explained your request, I thought you had understood. You said, with your air, or, with your breath, but all you meant was talking. You just wanted me to talk, as if that might bridge the gap. Oh, you do not know me, and I cannot tell you, it would only prove me right. What do you know without words? I am touching you and you are writing words on a screen. You are transmitting thoughts to someone else and you are not totally here. I leave and wonder when you will notice my absence. This is the only reason I leave you, so that maybe you will experience the lack of me, as I experience the lack of you. No matter how close I pull you, even into my very body, I lack you.

We stood on a cliff looking out over the edge of the world. It is so big, I say. It is so still, you say. Back in the town we had touched the leather horse things, and you said, they are made for something so much more powerful than we are, and you said, they are made so well, better than anything for people. And I touched them all with my hands, bridles and halters and bits and saddles. Oh September. The saddles the blankets the crops. Neither of us has ridden a horse. We will talk of the trips we have taken. I will tell you to buy a certain toy for a child I do not know. I hope that child is me. Once, you bought black shoes with white lightening bolts on them. I do not care for shoes because my feet are so big. You put metal to glass with duct tape. You remind me of my father.

My father called me, thinking I was thousands of miles from where I am. I have not returned the call. They say that fathers who have been absent ought to write to their daughters and apologize, even if it is the only thing they can do, even if their daughters will never forgive them or even acknowledge them. This, God bless him, my father has always done.

I want a long dress; I want a knife; I want a baby. We talk of Henry Miller, of his honesty, and the air is so light at the edge of the world, and so many of the trails are unauthorized. Why don’t we worship our ancestors here, you ask. In my family, we do, I say. And in another world I am writing to a stranger about how Georgia is like Russia and already I have nostalgia for the future I might share with the person I would tell this to, the person who might understand. You shove your arms in a heap of manure to see how warm it is on the inside — the people give you a look.

I can feel it all through me, the future we will not act out, the future we have already had, the future we have shared from the beginning. There was never a beginning, there was never. There was the edge of the world. It was so large. It was so still. And the birds on the rocks were sensitive, and the waves were sensitive, and the eyes that saw it all were sensitive.

It was simple: I loved someone and I wanted them to know it.

I would take you with me. I would take you into the hole in the center of my chest where I do not exist, have never existed, the laughter of permeability, the air. I would take you where I cannot go myself. God, this pain is exquisite, and your face, I write on your face, I take you on my life boat, I die in your arms as you change from a boy to an old man and back again, over and over. You are a completely different person. You are a mirror. I want to walk to the edge of the world with your DNA in my body.

The realization that submission, for me, is only a way to retain power, not to surrender it, as I once thought. This false surrender to someone else is a way of refusing to surrender to who I am, holding everything at such a distance, even my own thoughts and feelings. I am get so worked up in my abstractions, trying to convey my inner experience, a life of metaphysical ideas, that I neglect the simple embodied experience, where most of the truth lies, and all the portals to the infinite that cannot be found by looking. I would like to simply be in my body for a while. This may require action.

The anger of being asked to describe a physical sensation — I can only produce one or two words (warm, nice) that are obviously inadequate but safe for the reason. If I really tried to describe the sensation, the description would never cover it, would produce the wrong idea, would even replace the memory. And yet, once forced to say something, anything, it feels wonderful to have the listener agree — yes, that feeling feels something like those words for them, too.

I wish I could say more and more about such sensations: how putting my hand on your skin feels like dipping it under running water, like the surfaces are pierced with tiny holes and there is light and fluid passing through, back and forth as the surfaces sink into one another, and it seems that I am touching you from the inside and after a while there is no accounting for the direction of flow or whose skin is whose or where the warmth is coming from.

Having dreams where I am accidentally propelled much too high in the air, so high that I know I will die when I hit the ground, but after accepting certain death, the feelings of floating and lightness are incredible, and there is nothing terrifying about the view of the city below me, even as I am rapidly plummeting toward it. Somehow, after all this, I always manage to land softly, even though it is impossible.