Dear,

Suddenly I have the sense I have been dropped into an unfamiliar landscape. A desert, with its many empty arms outstretched, and hidden pockets of lushness. I try to explain my customs to anyone I encounter. Or I play along, mimicking the motions of sociality, laughing with a cavernous mouth. When in this zone I feel dead but of course I am not dead, I am simply viewing the arrangement from beneath a thick pane of glass. So: I find ways to re-enliven the situation. New and innovative gestures. Carefully dictated costumes and stage directions. A re-dedication to the mountain I find myself marching toward. Is lucidity in my future? Can I hold hands with everything good, easy? How will it feel, at last, to “belong here”?

Love,

Dear,

Lately I’m irritated, my haunches raised. Wait—I mixed up haunches and hackles. Spinning in little circles, chasing the tail. Time either feels so big I’m swimming or it compresses down under my heel. I can’t find a space to fit the desires of my shape. As a remedy I attempt more quickness and ease. Ease! I shout the word into the hedges and a blue jay flies out. I’m not taking for granted that as soon as I think I’m left behind by the universe I get tossed a tether. So here I am responding with due diligence, wanting to hold you how I’ve felt held. A little pinch or nudge to make sure we’re real. Behind us a trail of ghosts, the afterimages of three different cities. And ahead, the horizon, an eye-mark to set the sights.

Love,

Dear,

Ever since we asked the first question—“what will the new body be?”—I have studied my body like I am the specimen, each day a new set of conditions, a new hypothesis, a new experimental method, dutifully gathering the data points into a spiny garland. Since I’ve been away, my questions have multiplied, and none of them the right question. Language buckles under the pressure of articulation, collapsing into a jumble of latent meaning. It is in this spirit that I write you a letter from the field, seeking lucidity through correspondence. Perhaps you will send me your own field notes, your observations and reflections, which is to say, I miss you.

Love,

Dear,

I have found particular kinship with the invertebrates of land and sea. In them I read a re-orientation to the concept of selfhood, as a body with the capacity to split into multiple bodies, or a body that outgrows itself and sheds its exterior layer at regular intervals. These are models of how to live serially, as an iterative, regenerating self. I follow the invertebrates down, descending to the ocean floor or digging through the dirt. I follow them back through the phylogenetic tree, into deep time, slow time, geologic time, tonguing a groove. Will you meet me back-down there? We can burrow together, soft-bodied, many-limbed, absent-minded. Using our hands like spades to excavate a widening space. Working from a permanently larval stage, forever on the cusp of metamorphosis. Breaking the habit of distinguishing “figure” from “ground.”

Love,

Dear,

I can’t stop asking: What can I bear (carry)? What can I bear (endure)? What can I bear (produce)? As if these are the sole axes of evaluation and valuation. Can we move beyond “mere attenuated survival”?[1] I stretch my limbic system past the limits of my body, strings attached. I don’t seek answers, exactly. I seek a home as well as a way out. I seek attunement to the composite scale of multiple urgencies. I seek new apparatuses of care. I seek a choral language. I seek some grit, the texture of your company.

Love,

[1] Abendroth, Emily. Exclosures. Ahsahta Press, 2014.