Dear You,

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The rules say stay inside, and other things. Meanwhile, I perfect the push in and pull back, compiling a whole lifetime of fragments. But it’s nothing, I know that. Ramp up the ‘I’ or go home. It’s distance, something dreadful when you wake, and I’m labouring it. Throw in some humour, a self-aware irreverence to avoid alienating them, if you can manage it. Still, what I want from you is some patience. To sit alone in a room, and explain yourself to a screen, over and over: lover, friend, partner, damn—your therapist. Multiply by months, the threat of years, and the most you learn is how to go in circles. Everything is just the same as before, and, you say, ‘but that’s ok, that’s ok’. Laugh and ignore the ground, that you can’t see it.

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Take it from me: the things I’ve written? I’m barely willing to admit it. I read aloud, in mania, descriptively if nothing else, is what I thought, but I see it’s not so clear to you. Someone in here said ‘the fetish of resolution’ and I ask you to think about that, when you can’t quite make it out. It’s by design, all of this: no more than six; establish a hold and don’t let go; new face fined & a giant red A. I just made a joke then.

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Locked in by personal volition and I took the hinges off the door to let you know it. Writing to a world of a world that binds it in, then figures gripping fingers through the canvas, saying hold still, stop trying. A newspaper clipping, as if none of this ever happened, then following the trail across the floor and out the door—the fever of elopement, always, I define it now, a defiance. A lone figure, riding across the desert. . . How do you frame a countering action? To every hum in the dunes that stores your midnight rabbit holes, your naked selfies, your attempts at establishing closeness. ‘Cus you want it. Simulation too of assembly, of effectual change, of something viral coming this way. I don’t think fondly of this, you might see. Every move we make in this place takes you to a hole in the ground, under floodlights, or blank sky in low saturation, and digging up your tendons, gently pulling them, and your follicles, and that persistent ache in your temples. I’ll put this somewhere in an online exhibition.

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I write to you in this way as a form of leverage, inserting an artefact in the image so it grows larger with each copy, distracting you—a blank hole where a detail should be. When they’re searching for signs of lithium in coastal rockfaces, they call these voids. So take a sedative. This is where I begin dear Baby, dear Lithium. And it’s slipping again—the here and the not here, the body I’m in and the one you assume. Who are you? You’ll never know. I’ve never met you.

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I write from my room, in the city, and I love you.








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[“In the morning I’ll be better”=text unavailable/Reality: “Please, someone, anyone, show me this real thing.”]


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[“So go on, change the strategy=text unavailable/you killed that, your out-of-shot re-addiction”]

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