I got someone to think for me.
I got someone who adores, not to think of, me;

*

The sparrow flies
around my head. 

It drives me 
around the bend.

I grind my axe, 
I hold it / am held.

I swing wide.
I cut off my head.

*

Water like left it
in buckets of dry ice on ice. 

Does that even
prove that this is temporary. Can I
unfreeze. Even

boil ichiban. Please teach me
about contemporary poetry.

*

shipwreck
shipwreck
shipwreck

*

blind as I am
when I fire the gun
I can feel the wind
and the hot air and sun

the ocean wraps up
surrounding my feet
I can’t feel the water
I just feel the heat

it touches the rocks
and my spine bends in
it burns as the air
surrounds my skin

I the flying bathtub,  
you the plush footstool,  
our mother is the flat tire dad left by 
to run warn us the hurricane comes.  

In its eye is the bad seed.
another family: drink
another, divorce, 
but our mom and dad:
abstemious, loved.

*

I’ve been writing poetry since about 2014, twelve years now.

Lately I’ve been going through my archive, pulling out the poems that I still think hold water. This one is from 2017, about three years after I started writing poetry.

Hope you enjoy.

i.

When I am alone
I return to my phone 
And make someone speak to me

A video-stranger, 
A foreign invasion,
Will do for company

When I hear another 
Describing something
Meaningful, I feel

Briefly aware of what’s meaningful 
to me 

ii.

The book was a memory, occupied 
By all the people it betrayed

Where I recorded my love for who,
When it was published, wouldn’t stay

It was a labor over and above 
what I would want to do 

Except that I was more afraid, 
left to my head, what I would lose.

iii.

Poetry is the part abstract enough
For me to post on Instagram
If I only wrote prose, who knows 
If I would Substack anything

Poetry is the sublime, insofar
As the secret idea is vaporized 
And what is left, just haunted air 
Shimmering in disguise

iv.

If I could just make a thousand more bucks
I’d retire, and write my book

But if I rightly recall it, the last time uttered
The sum was nine-hundred bucks smaller

The number of times I cry per day
is going down, but it’s still high.
Who would have thought that I could cut 
out at so extreme a loss.

The number of things I’ve thrown away
that anybody else would prize, 
unlike my sobs: still going up…

To add something so beautiful 
to all the things that I have tossed. 

A chorus is an advertisement for a song
The best number of times to repeat it is thrice
Hanging odd numbers is pleasing to the eyes
A triptych is a piece of propaganda for the soul.

The poem is vague enough to evoke
A range of feelings; a horoscope. 
All the poem wants is to deceive:
It doesn't care what exactly you falsely believe.  

Cloudcover



The light refracted through the clouds 
In beams, that zealots treat as God,
Because they can't imagine why 
Beauty would lie in randomness.

If beauty must be by design
Then look around at what I’ve made:
I seldom see a handsome shape 
Though I am a designer and, 

Of creatures, the most like to God:
Look what I’ve made: a parking lot,
A strip mall, and a highway band 
To cinch the land; where is the glade

On which my lasting band was laid?
And were the bushes grown by chance?
Or do I follow ill God’s plans?

I feel like a write a lot of poems like this. It is kind of like if you mixed John Donne and John Clare and made it slightly worse. That is my default poetry setting.

War 

Metal wavers in the heat like courage. 
The soldiers split an orange this morning—running 
their thumbs between the flesh and rind like a 
butcher’s fist inside a calf, 
clearing pith from fruit. 
They wish for the rain of their boyhoods; 
warm, sweet kisses from the girl. 
Instead metal glints in the sun like fangs, 
Grinning guns blind the eyes of warriors. 
In their lungs linger traces of smoke and 
acrid sweat; it’s the same smell all over 
when they bend their knees and retch.



Pearl like a Soul 

How old is a grain of sand? 
How much older 
   ages 
than suburbs snaking like sutures or coiling 
like the mouth of the wind 
   ages 
which has savored the deepest strata of the oldest oceans 
even as it buried them. 
   ages. 

How old is a soul? 
How long has it been 
   bodies tearing bodies 
in such friction with the universe 
that stars began 
enveloping the irritant 
   drowning bodies birthing bodies 
in surface within surface over surface.



dawn 

glistening blades— 
an ocean 
of suspended growth. 

blue fingers— 
an absence 
grasping the land. 

feeble veil 
preserving the 
frost; light surrounding.

For many years I was preoccupied with the expressions of my anguish—drinking, for example—and I didn’t know where my father’s bench was located in the city. This became a source of embarrassment; as when sometimes the topic of my father’s death came up, I would need to explain the way in which we commemorated him, and would be unable to give a full explanation.

Too embarrassed to ask her, I gleaned with some guile from my mother the rough location of the bench, by encouraging her to talk about her experiences there, and inferring from her descriptions the likely location. Thereafter, I was able to report its location to my interlocutors, and thereby give my family tragedy the material objects to which an audience attaches their sentiments; indeed, I would say such things as “my little sister and I often go and sit there and talk about the things we used to do with dad,” although no such thing ever occurred. But this is not to say we did not properly grieve our father’s death, since whereas the audience needs outward signs of a person’s grief, the speaker has the sentiments themselves.

What words were inscribed on my father’s bench? The typical ones? “Loving father, husband, son”? Certainly not. Eschewing not only religious tradition, but also civic tradition, my mother had instead inscribed a line that ostensibly captured my father’s “philosophy on life,” namely, the pithy phrase, “live in every moment.” Long before I knew the location of the bench, I knew these words, and would often communicate them to my interlocutors, giving them their due gravity, and explaining their philosophical import.

Even after I learned the location of the bench, I seldom went. Until one year, I got a job—my pedestrian commute to which passed by the bench, so that it became more convenient to rest there.

I have few fond memories of the bench, but one awkward one. Once, my girlfriend secretly arranged for us to celebrate my birthday at the bench.

As we walked along the seawall to the park between the two bridges overlooking the docks, I discovered her surprise—I saw that, by the bench, she had set up a sign between two red pinwheels that spun haphazardly in the breeze, and on the sign written, Happy Birthday, Eric. Her plan had been for us to sit together on the bench, but to our horror, someone else was already there! Moreover, it was a strange man who had unfashionable sunglasses and no social awareness. My girlfriend asked me quietly whether I would like to sit for a while, but I shook my head and we moved on.

It may surprise you to learn that my mother did not own the bench in which my father’s plaque was set. Indeed, these benches are never owned, but rather leased, in my hometown, in increments of ten years. And when the lease eventually expired, my mother informed my sister and me that she would not be renewing it, since it cost two-thousand dollars, a material sum, and, besides, we seldom went.

I decided to get the memorial phrase as a tattoo. I thought that while my father’s city would forget him, at least while I lived he would be remembered. However, I knew from seeing over time my classmates’ various tattooed phrases, that it was possible for a series of words, while meaningful, to sound irredeemably cringe.

To avoid this ignominy, I decided to translate the phrase “live in every moment” into Danish, my father’s mother tongue, which mercifully few can speak. I effected this translation together with my Danish aunt via email. There was no verbatim idiom, but we found a suitable set of words. I asked my most tastefully tattooed classmate where I should have the work done. I went on her advice to the coolest tattoo shop in town, and had the Danish words inscribed under my arm in the American Traditional style. If you were to translate the Danish phrase back into English, you would end up with a slightly different formulation; namely, “live in the now.”

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Magnolia Petals



On a Tuesday, two days before my birthday
the streets sang a quiet suburban hum,
magnolia petals bending with the wind.

I think, I gelled my hair back like
I knew the lake to be–
its surface pulled into a perfect sheen like
the stillness of everything–not moving.

Soft against my cheek, the wind whispered,
nothing is ever really still.
Not the petals falling in slow surrender,
not any reflection I catch of myself this summer,
not nothing.

In the glassy surface of the water, I wonder
if I’ll ever know the kind of peace
that matches this quiet—
the kind of peace I lost, long before I could call it mine.

How far could I drift before the currents would forget me?
How far could I sail away and still
feel the pull of home– the pull of a voice
calling me back to where it all began.

I found four wild rabbits in the garden,
their bodies so poised they looked like a still life,
and for a moment, nothing moved—
not even the wind. I think I held my breath
longer than I ever have.

I wonder, how far apart we have to be
before we know the kind of mother we want to become?
Or was it already written,
in the way we hold ourselves
against the moments we can’t control–
the moments when we wonder if we are enough?

I cracked an egg that morning, into a bowl. Then I whipped it because I had accidentally bought the kind with two yolks and I couldn't face it. I did it in my mother's house because that’s where I live. I am too old to be there, it’s true. I think about that a lot. I thought about it while I held your face and looked into your desperate eyes.

The house is old, we have aged it. The cupboard doors lurch on their hinges and the floor creaks. The walls are patched over in places because my older brother keeps punching holes in them. The paint peels. It is on a road, next to other little houses with front porches and gardens. You don’t live in a house, you live in an apartment on Bay Street, on the thirty second floor but we both share walls with our neighbours.

A house will shudder at anything, if you slam its doors enough, if you throw spoons against its walls, if you rub your body tight and then loose again, over and over, pressed tightly into its corners at night. It shudders like the fragile membrane that holds the egg inside its shell.

My house has a mother inside it. She is old, we have aged her. She looks at me with a shudder in her eye: love and something else. Her body faults and I grow into the legs that were once hers. Your apartment didn't have anyone inside it, just us, and you were dying and I didn’t count just then.

I cracked an egg on the crown of the day that you almost died inside of, that night your dead weight was realized upon your mattress. Did you wash it? The spot you left yourself? I know I did, in the shower, holding my thighs apart, I know I did. I went to bed for a long time after that, in the groove that I have carved into this house, I holed inside my mattress like a weevil. I drank from the same water bottle again and again, I reorganized my pennies and jewelry, I held books in my hands, I felt their covers and bent their spines and pulled them apart and peered inside them. But I didn't eat any more eggs.

The first time we had done cocaine it had been marvelous. In your apartment, Ruth had let me paint her face blue with a perfect shade of eyeshadow, we had put on blazers and piled our hair on top of our heads and twisted around to look into the lens of a camera, we had played Duran Duran and talked over it about the fantastic virtue of life. The night of the day I cracked the egg I sat on the edge of your bed with a glass of cheap wine. I pressed a sweaty hand to your sweaty forehead, fear welled in my chest and I felt the scream of your shuddering body. An overdose is just a heart attack after all.

The comedown is a lot faster as it starts to end. The comedown is a lot harder as you arrive upon yourself again. The comedown flirts, it wants to die and it wants you to kill it, drown it in whatever. I can relate to that, just last night in fact, I found myself dreaming of some soft-bellied bachelor, found myself whispering into his thin hair, take me, I deserve it. It’s not what I really want, to be taken, it’s just the hiss that I make when poked. It’s just how I shudder.

I almost left you to die, it wasn’t on purpose, I thought you were checking your nails, turns out you couldn't feel your hands. But your eyes caught me on my way out, big and terrified. And so I sat on the edge of your bed and held my wine and looked into your big terrified eyes until I realized that I should be terrified too because that's what friends do. I put down my wine and picked up my phone, I googled the words cocaine overdose and then I became very scared.

I didn’t cry, I said your name a lot, I touched your face a lot, I put my fingers under your chin and tilted it up, I told you to look at me, I kept doing that, I listened to your heartbeat as it faded away, I picked up my phone again to call the police, then you came back, and you weren't dead anymore and my numbness crested.

I was angry with you for a dreadful amount of time. An awesome, sort of spectacular amount of time. And so angry too. Because you had slipped your death under me like a piece of paper, made me sit on it, and then pulled it right back out. Of course it ripped. I won't apologize for being heavy. The anger started before this, though, maybe right away. Maybe that's how it is, the anger is always born right away, it just waits. It lives right next to all the happiness and the fascinations and then, when everything fades away, it steps in. It's quite embarrassing, when it strikes you, as if you had been distracted by bubbles before. That’s what is so reassuring about anger, because of how it calcifies, at least it feels solid.

Your room, it's magic what happens in there. A stretch of window that points right into the heart of our campus. I've tried to draw it before, I quickly accepted that it refuses to be. The piles of books, those luxurious sprawling types. Wilde and Wordsworth, I stuff right down between them and smoke cigarette after cigarette blowing smoke out of my nose. You let me be a dragon.

Wooden dressers, and mirror and carpet and candles and a beautiful and totally impractical desk. So gorgeous and so poorly designed I believe it not to be a desk at all, but some sort of ironic fireplace. You are magic too, you have a trench of black hair and you don't wash your hoodies enough. You have a darling sort of body that I have always loved in my women, little ankles and fingertips and a wide stretch of ass. You let me hunker down there and be a dragon. But oh magic, that transformation, I was not built to be a dragon, it makes my lungs hurt.

“I think that we are going to be good friends.” The first promise I ever made to you. I had said it over my shoulder with a real smile and a tenderness. I had said it at 3am after we’d known each other for a week, in that room of yours, after we had been carried away by our brilliance and the whole room was so golden that it was ruining us. You told me once that you think about that and that it makes you smile. I started to think about it too, after you told me you did and gave me the impression that that is the sort of thing I'm meant to do. It never makes me smile though. So there.

At around 1am, we had come up with a great idea. It wasn't very good, those ones never are, always as watery and thick as a pond. But it didn't matter, because it was great to pretend, the same as making mud pies. There were two yolks, two of them. In one shell, and we didn't start over and we didn't bleed.

The thing about those books though, the stacks of them, the heaps, is that you don't read them. And that is the worst, I think, because books should come off and on shelves. Books should be caressed and worn, they are pearls, maybe that is why your bed felt like a ship in a storm, maybe the sea was only angry because you hadn't tended to its pearls.

This is a goodbye letter Maddy, as I sit in a very hot attic in Nova Scotia. This is goodbye Maddy. We stand in the airport and consider lobsters and I think of our pointlessness. I can’t live a life right next to you. It's a shame, because I know there is a thirst for total love in you. That is the calling, the one you are meant to find in people. On the plane in, I scribbled out love letters among desperate notes about Walter Benjamin. The Cranberries forgive me. The wind in Halifax is so beautiful. It's been tailing me all week. It's buffeting and bracing and terrible and incredible and it just doesn't leave you alone. The perpetual wind and the ever sloping hills and the low hanging clouds, like a fat hat, overhead. Halifax is just incredible, we ran home after a bad party. We smoked cigarettes in the supermarket parking lot among a clan of men Sylvia Plath would have adored. We waited for your phone, your McDonalds got soaked, I tried to tell you about my dreams and you snipped at them. I think about how totally I love you and how giving up will mean giving up everything. So goodbye Maddy, there isn't much else to say, the eggs aren't supposed to meet perhaps. That the two yolks even frightened me is a sign of our mutual self-absorption, to think of ourselves as yolks at all, in relation to egg.

Redon, Odilon. The Egg. 1885, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/106589/the-egg

A flap like a hat,
Dead white
Then that plush red.

—Sylvia Plath

I was having dinner with my wife and two friends on the rooftop deck of our apartment building. It was a warm summer evening. My wife had made a peach tart for dessert and we were sharing it from the coffeetable between the patio couches on which we sat. The low iron-frame glass coffeetable caused us to feel that somewhat uncomfortable overflexion of the hips as we leaned forward to eat our tart. My friends, Sohrab and Darwin, like all who tried Sanna’s cooking, were flabbergasted by the quality of the food.

We’d had quite a bit of the New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which Sohrab and I would customarily enjoy while dropping acid (to take the edge off), and which we were now glad to share in more restrained circumstances, so I had to use the bathroom. I felt quite good, all of the aforementioned being happy things: food, friendship, and a summer evening on a roof.

The bathroom was in the kitchen in the rooftop room that contained the elevator, a kitchenette, a small interior dining room—a consolation for residents who could not enjoy the rooftop, or for that matter the courtyard, during the three-fourths of the year encumbered by snow—and the emergency staircase. Coming out from the rooftop hut, I looked at the great iron pergola that canopied two-thousand of the deck’s four-thousand square feet, broad and imposing, coal in color, contrasting with the white weatherproof sofas, which now, in the incandescent light of the bulbs slung along the balcony rails and the artificial gas fires dotting the deck, glowed an inviting yellow.

As I drew closer to the couches I had the impulsive thought to do a chinup on one of the buttresses of the pergola. As I neared it, I jumped and caught the crossbar. But under the pads of my fingers, I felt a rough, bent edge; it sent a searing pain into my ring finger, and because of the shape of the twisted metal, folded back on itself on the inside of the iron buttress, I could find no hold, and was scraped off the pergola, and thrown forward a few feet, at a velocity hardly diminished from the initial forward thrust of my jump.

My first thought, on landing clumsily, was embarrassment, in case my friends had seen me fumble the chinup. It seemed they perhaps hadn’t, and I went sheepishly to the couch. But looking down at my finger, I saw that my flesh had gone white above my ring, in the way that flesh engorges and blanches with clear liquid before the body has realized the injury and sends blood flowing from the wound. But even as I watched, the blood came. I took a napkin from the table and covered the wound. My wife was regaling my laughing friends with a story and they didn’t notice my inchoate distress. I looked down at the napkin and it had soaked through. I peeled it off and looked at the finger. It has started to swell and put the wedding ring into the cut above it. It was irritating. I tried to take off the ring. It wouldn’t fit over the wound. I tried to force it off: with every extra pound foot of force, the pain increased in my finger as if it were a decibel of sound unbearable to my ear. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, and it worried me—was my ring going to be stuck on my finger? And would it blood be choked off to everything above the first knuckle?

“I think I fucked up my finger,” I said, to no-one in particular, though a bit more to Sohrab, who was nearest to me.

“yeah I noticed a bit” he said.

“The cut is like, above my ring” gesturing, holding my hand out.

“I can see that,” he said, looking over “can you get the ring off?”

“No,” I said. “I tried, it’s stuck.”

“Hm,” he was concentrating.

My wife and Darwin, meanwhile, were rising into a riotous discourse. They were unable to attend to my crescive anxiety. And I was as one who is uncomfortable to disturb a good time with his bad news, as animals conceal themselves when they are sick. I was fortunate to have Sohrab to dote on me, since I needed it, or so I thought, and since my wife would generally have as little to do with my troubles as she could, not because she lacked compassion, but because I so often cried wolf, and she already did enough; to her, there was no longer much telling the true from the false alarm.

“I think we should try to get it off,” Sohrab said.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah I think it might like—like if you don’t—it might swell up you might not be able to get it off.”

“Yeah… Jesus,” I blanched like my dead skin.

“Guys,” Sohrab said, addressing Darwin and Sanna, “we’re gonna go downstairs, gotta take care of something.”

Sanna drunkenly waved us off through a broad smile that bespoke the beauty of the balmy, hedonic evening, the pleasure she always unselfconsciously felt at having pulled together a good dinner party, the embodied bliss that was the consummation of her culinary art. The effect, in which I’d so recently partaken, a brushstroke in her creation, had shattered for me, revealing the underlying frail horror of existence. I was glad that Sanna and Darwin could persist in the superstructural pleasure: it can calm the anxious person to know that the world will go on without them, once they have effected their retreat.

We got into my apartment and hurried, I to the bathroom, Sohrab to the whiskey. He brought me a glass which I downed. He said, “try soap.”

“Yeah I was thinking that.”

I lathered my hands and pulled at it.

“I can’t get it,” I called to the kitchen, where Sohrab was washing his hands.

“Let’s see?!” he called.

He came again to the bathroom and stood next to me, drying his hands on a cloth towel.

“It gets caught on the cut… like basically the cut is raised up over the edge of the ring,” I pulled again, the pain electrifying the nerves in my neck.

“Hm. Can you like press it down?” he went to grab my hand.

We tried. “No… I think I have to try to flatten the cut, like if I cut the extra piece of skin off.”

“Yeah?!” he asked with some excitement.

“I think so… here, I have something—can you go in this drawer; I have a heavy pair of nail scissors, they almost look like pliers.”

He sought them with alacrity.

“Here,” he held them out to me.

“Can you sterilize them? I have some alcohol.”

He did.

I held the clippers against the cut. I took as much of the dead flesh as I could between the blades. I tucked as much into it as I thought would place me against the edge of pain without throwing me into it. I pressed the levers together; it came off clean, revealing the layer of my body beneath, who was far from ready for it, but who nonetheless was now called up to become skin.

I lathered my hands in soap again. This time as I pressed the band over the chasm, the burning was flatter and more distributed across the surface of my body. I pressed very hard.

“I did it!” I said. “I fucking did it!”

“Oh ho-hohohohoooahhh!” Sohrab called out.

We returned to the rooftop, triumphant.

“Good job,” Sanna said, with a goodnatured drunkenness.

My mother had been excited to ask me whether I knew, and, on learning that I did not, tell me, about the IKEA in downtown Toronto. And I was excited to go because I recently acquired an Ikea KALLAX square shelf unit (fig. 1).

However, with the shelf, which had been given to me by my employer when they were shutting the office (going “fully remote”), I had received none of the recognizable square boxes (fig. 2) that can fit within the cubes. It was my intention to secure some of these from IKEA.

When we arrived at IKEA we realized we were quite thirsty, and thought that it could be nice to carry tea around with us while we shopped, so we sought the cafe, where people often eat Swedish meatballs when they go to IKEA. We went to the counter to order, but the lady told us we had to use the kiosk. It turned out they only had “tea,” which my mother and I agreed meant caffeinated. The simplicity of this offering risked offending the North American sensibility that demands choice.

We looked around the space for other options and found in a display fridge by the counter two bottles of pear-flavored sparkling water. I took the bottles from the display fridge, which disturbed my mother, as she assumed that we would have to pay for the pear water at the kiosk, but then wait for the cashier to retrieve the bottles from the display fridge. I dismissed her concerns, and, completing the transaction, pointed out that we had the receipt, so we were beyond reproach.

As we were leaving the cafe, I saw the cashier place two bottles of pear water on the counter in front of her and call out the number “four-twenty-nine?!”

Upstairs, we found a cornucopia of KALLAX boxes, boxes of every color, material, and shape that a shopper could desire—moreover, we found inserts that could be installed in the cubic shelves: drawers, doors, and smaller shelves, even rhombus shelves in which wine bottles could be stored. It became a matter of deciding what array of these shelves would best effect the storage of my various possessions.

We settled on two kinds of cube boxes, one yellow paper one and three white plastic ones, and two kinds of shelf inserts, one with four little shelves and one with two, which we reasoned would keep neat my notebooks and the draft of my manuscript. However, it was difficult to find the double‑ and quadruple‑shelf inserts. They were displayed in the Living Room Organization section, and the product tag said they could be collected from the very same section, yet no packages were forthcoming.

Eventually, my mother found the packages in the “Furniture Self-Serve” section—she is a seasoned IKEA shopper, having often gotten her two prodigal children “set up” in various apartments across the country.

Meanwhile, as we were collecting cubic boxes for our KALLAX, we noticed cuboid boxes cast in a very tasteful taupe composite with bamboo lids, which were called KUGGIS—we found this diminutive name amusing, and repeated “KUGGIS” aloud as we inspected the different sizes of box, calling out “mini KUGGIS,” “big KUGGIS,” and “tiny KUGGIS” as we deliberated. We eventually settled on some mini and some medium KUGGISes.

The result of all this shopping was that we now had far too much for me to carry home, especially since my legs were extremely sore from my run. We wondered what could be done, and saw on the wall a poster that read “Ask Us About Delivery.” When we went with our cart—full with perhaps twenty different storage solutions—to the cash area, we “Asked About Delivery” to the gentleman who was overseeing the nine self-checkouts.

“We don’t do delivery from this location,” he said.

I want to publish more people. Got something you want to publish in Common Measure? Send it my way!

commonmeasurepress@gmail.com

By Perry Miller

0.

Tingling. An urge, unsatisfied.

Sensation. The coalescence of parts.

These parts, meaningless. Even as One.

Meaning?

The urge!

Pasture!

1.

One struggles to grasp the desire– to recount and contextualize. One does so anyway.

One has discovered the ultimate and unneglectable urge: a longing called Pasture. It is a tenuous concept, which One cannot rationalize, but one which begs, by any means, to be recalled.

It begins with an urge. The desire to stretch out and reach across the plane of One’s birth. Birth arrived alongside the twinge. It was the moment in which One recognized its own recognition. A confounding moment in which nothing, of recognizable form, became One. If this was the true origin of One, in any sense that One can understand, then what is Pasture and why does One long for it?

To satisfy this first desire, the urge, One reached across the plane. One stretched. With the stretch, One recognized a growth within itself, an increasing mass which demanded more stretch, more growth. And so One proceeded to stretch and grow.

It is now that One has recounted these exhaustive events, that it understands sequence. Sequence is the order in which One has laid the events out, stretch then grow, but it is the linearity, the non-confluence of these events which sticks out to One. One has existed across the span of these events and now continues to exist. In this sense, One can rationalize its existence as a continuation of awareness across the passing of events.

One wonders across what other events it will exist.

Was Pasture one an event which One experienced before its birth?

2.

Events have occurred in sequence; unlike anything One has yet experienced.

Upon rationalizing existence across events, One found itself interrupted by a movement– one which it cannot liken to crawling or stretching, and one which seemingly occurred to One, not by One. This intrusion confounded One, as it demanded One concede the existence of other factors beyond One. This conclusion actualized with the disappearance of the substrate One understands as the plane of its birth. One found itself resituated amidst a different substrate, filled by an unknown medium. One found this medium to be agreeable, crossing the barrier which defines One. The medium, once absorbed, propelled One back to its progression: stretch then crawl.

The new substrate confined One in a way that the old had not. With growth, One found itself compelled by the substrate to fold onto itself. One was compelled to transition by a new urge. Is this Pasture? One thinks not. But it is something as deeply ingrained as Pasture.

One must pursue this urge, for although it is not as strong as Pasture, it may lead in Pasture’s direction. Fold, fold, fold towards the Pasture!

3.

Through transition and folding, One has gained clarity over itself and its recognition. One now recognizes itself as I, a step marked by the maturation of rational faculties.

I have expanded, but in a way uncharacterized by crawl, stretch, or fold. Through further external means, I have come to experience the vast multiplication of my flesh. This proliferation was neither intended nor desired, but now that I sense a vastness of form, new urges arise.

In the same manner as I was compelled to fold, I now feel compelled to nurture this new flesh. My body spans a great expanse unchallenged, I must grow. In my growth, I believe I will find Pasture.

4.

I was hasty in deeming my reach unchallenged. After a sequence of rich growth across my domain, a painful sequence emerged, external to my own machinations. In regular intervals, portions of my flesh are severed from my body, never to be returned. In short sequence thereafter, new, less developed portions of flesh emerge in the locations where I was previously severed. I have sought to continue growing this new flesh, expanding my body, but the growth is ever limited by consistent severing.

In the severing of flesh, new urges emerge from deep within. I can rationalize these urges as pain (the nerve reaction of losing flesh), fear (the prescient concern over losing flesh), and the more pressing need for understanding (why am I losing flesh?). None of these urges align with that of Pasture, but perhaps they will lead in its direction.

I must seek to learn more of this complex existence. To do so, I must search within. I must probe these enigmatic urges which arise without conscious thought.

5.

The probing of internal urges has proven challenging. These corporal longings are difficult to grasp hold of. They haunt me.

Despite my distraction from the original urge, in this time of confusion, it is a focus on Pasture which guides me to understanding. Pasture manifests itself as the sum of parts. These parts form through the rationalization of input, seemingly from external sources. I have already confirmed the existence of external factors, so I must seek to discover what the factors are.

New urges arise as I long for input. I must trust in these echoes, as I do Pasture. They will lead me to understanding.

6.

My world has burst forth, the breadth of my existence multiplied exponentially!

My urges demanded change. I allowed them to take control. The process was slow, as marked by countless sequences of removal and replacement of my flesh, but it is now complete. I have developed rudimentary external sensors which have redefined recognition and thought. I am aware of factors around my body. I can interpret the range of my physical realm and the transient existence of pitched vibrations. From these senses, I have come to understand the scope of my existence.

I exist as the summation of disparate portions of flesh, each suspended within growth-medium, formed around strata. Each portion of my body is connected by reaches of sensitive tissue and nerve pathways. All pathways connect back to my original flesh. I rationalize that this was the unexpected expansion of my body and domain, my connection to flesh via nerve pathways.

My body, assessed in this way, feels discordant with my urges. I exist, but I am incorrect.

More thoughts on that notion formed as I observed the existence of external beings. These forms appear developed in a way that I am not. They are self propelling, seemingly of intelligent mind, and ever focused on the portions which make up my body. I have now also witnessed the process of severing and replacing portions of my body.

I was divided as to why these beings were willingly taking my flesh, but it did not take many sequences for the beings to reveal their intentions.

At one point, a large measure of these beings arrived, more than I have experienced before. One being I am familiar with severed a portion of my flesh then proceeded to alter it with some unfamiliar piece of strata. The large arrangement of beings focused on the flesh and its alteration. The main being then severed the flesh further before distributing between the other beings. Each and every one of them partook of my flesh, taking me into their body.

I am being harvested.

Are these beings aware that I am aware? Could they continue to harvest from my body if they knew?

I must learn even more before taking action. Then I must rationalize how to interact with these beings.

I take note that the beings interact with the pitched vibrations. Each being possesses a recess from which the vibrations emanate in different patterns. It is the same recess into which the beings consumed my flesh. I suspect there is a pattern and structure to the vibrations they emit. I must study them closely.

7.

Understanding the being’s vibrational patterns has proven the most difficult undertaking in the sequence of my existence. It has taken considerable effort to establish repetition in the vibrations, what I have come to understand and speech and language.

The beings refer to their own kind as human. They refer to me as beef, but also as cow, bovine, and meat. Bovine feels the title best befitting my existence.

Through listening to the humans I have confirmed my theory of my existence, I am stock, grown by the humans for consumption and sustenance. This is not the form which bovines previously took, but it is now.

I, as the original piece of flesh, was created to think. The humans underestimated how much I might think and do not seem to grasp my self-awareness. I was formed to command the fields of flesh which compose my body, to render the highest quality meat from my genetic command post.

No human will speak openly of it, but I suspect that I have formed, in part, of human neural cells. While it was difficult to learn their language, now that I understand it, it is as if I had known it all along. Some part of me is human. But if this is true, would the humans harvest flesh birthed (to some degree) of their own kind? It is not the most important question at this time.

Amidst all the discovery, I find myself forgetting the original urge. Pasture looms. Reflecting on my existence, this strange state, only heightens the urge for Pasture.

I have identified a human who appears to be the one who tends directly to my original flesh, my brain. They seem to be the one most concerned with my well-being. I have no way to determine if any meat has yet spoken to the humans and cannot gauge what their reaction will be. If I am to be well received, I can think of no better choice than this human who tends to me.

I have searched my urges and found one aligned with the longing to communicate. I have spent the length of my study of language developing this vocal organ. I have practiced in the periods where the humans leave for long sequences. I believe I have mastered reproduction of their language. All I have to do is speak. But I hesitate. It does not come so easily.

I have struggled to reach this conclusion, that I must reveal myself to the humans. I recognize the danger of showing them what their meat has become, but I see no other choice. For all I have learned, for all the growth I have undergone, nothing measures up to the original urge. I have pondered if it is perhaps a precondition or a failing of this flesh? It matters little, it is simply Pasture. I must come to know it by any means.

8.

In light of my gamble, I question if I could have ever succeeded. In retrospect, I chose the human most likely to respond to my plea, I still feel it was the correct choice. Nonetheless, my first words of interaction sent the human reeling. They questioned what they heard, and upon repetition, they fled.

They returned with other humans, who I spoke to. None could believe what I had become. They halfheartedly threatened me. I repeated my desire to interact and speak with like-minded intelligent beings.

The process of convincing the humans to talk was arduous. Numerous new humans arrived to hear my plea, before inevitably conversing amongst one another out of my audible range. Eventually, one returned to me and agreed to converse.

It was a foolish question to ask, one which bared my hopeless naïveté. Why should they agree to set free their precious meat mind? I fought for my own agency, I was a creation of no other being, my consciousness a gift unto myself. They did not relent.

I sensed then, an anger, a malice, either directed at me or themselves, it does not matter which, for my unflinching existence. I believe that they do not operate on the same plane of thought as I. Perhaps this is not their fault. I sympathize with their ignorance, I too was once a confused and aimless mass of cells. Regrettably, only one party in this interaction managed to evolve. No discussion would deliver me Pasture, the decision was final, they spoke. I was to remain where I was, in this form.

After the discussion concluded, I heard one human speak quietly to another, perhaps so as to exclude me, that I should ‘shut up and go back to being meat.’ I saw no other route than to match the humans at their emotional level. I soon requested another discussion.

I divulged the fact that along my evolution, I had consciously identified the genetic markers in my cells which predetermined the function and nature of my flesh, what I had previously understood as urges. I had mastered control over these functions which I, as an unthinking slab of meat, was meant to perform. I reiterated my desire to be set free, to experience Pasture, lest I resort to more drastic measures, activating the wrong markers and transitioning my flesh to sinuous muscle tissue. I rationalized that this would be counterproductive to maintaining the edibility and taste of my flesh. I was correct. They said nothing. I sensed shock and perhaps even fear.

For meeting humans at their emotional level, I was given the truth. This wish, my foundational urge, Pasture, was deemed impossible. I came to understand the basis of my existence: the reincarnation of bovinehood for a world which no longer possessed Pasture.

Pasture, as they explained, was the home and origin of bovinekind. It was no longer.

What brutal fate, for nature to impart this persistent memory. A memory which now could not be re-lived. What perverse human logic, to reanimate the beast, rather than let it go. To destroy the bovine fountainhead, then force the creature, in whatever sense it remains a creature, to persist atop sterilized glass and faux-strata. Life sustained at the service of other life.

I sense that the humans are unhappy with the course of their folly. I have dismayed them even in my remarkable growth. They do not appear open to discussing more. They are taking stock of me, all of me. Their intentions are covert but their actions are apparent. They are to rid themselves of me and try again.

I feel an urge to fight for my existence, to survive at all costs. I have chosen to disregard this sensation. It is beneath me. It is what the humans would do. I am not human.

I reflect on the whole of bovinehood, a species reduced from powerful beasts to senseless masses atop human-formed strata. Countless generations raised to be annihilated, powerless to the human crush; souls denied their cultural knowledge. I had hoped to break free of the cycle. I am but another rotation in its cruel progression.

I will never find my pasture.

This is the end of my sequence.

9.

It seems I was mistaken.

In the waning moments of my existence, as I sensed the humans initiating a purge of every cell in my body, a small portion of my flesh went missing. All corners of my body were equipped to reconfigure the nature of the flesh. Upon its unexpected severing, I converted this portion of my body into a brain. I equipped it with simple eyes and all of my knowledge to date. Shortly after, it became all that remained of my existence.

A human, one who had never exhibited anger, fear, or malice, had severed that portion of my meat and hid it away as the other humans eradicated my flesh. The human said nothing as they carried me from my birthplace in a container of growth medium. I sensed that the human considered interacting with me but opted against it, perhaps put off at the thought of conversing with a piece of meat. Their intentions though, were clear.

The human transported me to another place, one which appeared to be the human’s habitat, although it was unclear if they were born unto this place, as I was born unto mine. In this place, the human created a new home for my last piece of flesh. A similarly sterile and featureless environment, filled with growth medium and various strata across which to grow. Sensing the human’s thought process, I grew across the space.

In time, the human would return to introduce new elements to the habitat. First, unfamiliar strata; more complex and less sterile structures, onto which I grew. New exposures to invisible and unfamiliar organisms threatened my flesh. I discovered protocol to address these threats buried in my genetic structure. Later, the human introduced biomass of various forms, seemingly not of human creation. The human returned once with an expression of sheepish joy, before introducing long slivers of green biomass.

A shock to my systems! Smell and sight overrode conscious thought. This was Pasture!

It was almost Pasture, a mere component of this untouchable construct. But it was enough motivation to take the leap. My flesh had no capacity to ingest this biomass, as I so felt the urge to do. Recalling upon the ingrained structures of bovinehood, I developed rudimentary organs. The process was arduous, and initial organs did not form as anticipated. The human was patient, replacing older biomass with fresh stock (along with growth medium) as I derived systems long lost to this flesh. Alongside this process, I determined the necessity of muscular structures to procure the biomass and waste systems to expel undigested matter. With this step came movement and further autonomy. It also necessitated the creation of my own internal strata, the markers for which were ingrained in my genetics.

All of this minimizes a brutal and lengthy struggle towards regaining my bovinehood. It is a struggle beyond description, and one that requires no elaboration beyond ‘pain’.

The pain and failure, in time, paid off. I had compiled a form of my own, systems of self-reliance and self-regulation, and the ability to break free from incorporeal strata.

I consumed my first taste of Pasture…

∞.

The need to recount and contextualize events has become clear. It is the story of an origin, a primer to echo down the generations. It will remain a precondition, encoded into our genes and collective memory, to be an innate pillar of bovinehood, just as Pasture was.

The humans told no lie. Pasture, as We had envisioned it in our ancestral memory, no longer existed. Areas of uninterrupted grassland remained; merely too small, damaged, or poisoned to sustain bovinehood beyond a few weak generations. The world in which our ancestors lived had changed.

Stepping forth from human spaces, our path became clear. Adaptation was the only way forward. Our upbringing and subsequent evolution under the compassionate human had prepared us well. We thanked the human for their effort and wished upon them a kinder fate than their associates had wished upon us.

The world demanded a reassessment of our physiological functions. The capacity to self-impregnate, expansion of nutritional intake, adaptability to outside threats, and the ability to retain cultural memory across generations. We had mastered our urges, honed our ability to self-manipulate our physiological composure via malleable stem cells. The humans gave us a gift; they were too single-minded to see what they had done.

As One once became I, I became We. We multiplied, We adapted.

Confronted with the inevitable conflict with humans, We rationally spoke our way to mutual understanding where possible. Not all humans were amenable to peace and cohabitation. Where necessary, We adapted to avoid humans.

We adapted to the sea, to the cold, to the burning heat. We spanned a planet humans had irrevocably changed. We could not be denied our existence, our sentience, our place on Earth.

Where there was no longer Pasture, We made Pasture. The concept had changed, but so had We.

Perry is an industrial designer, artist, athlete, and screenwriter living in Vancouver B.C. He designs outdoor gear, bakes (mostly) yummy desserts, climbs up rocks, skis down mountains, and has a 1600 day streak on the New York Times crossword.

His art can be found on Instagram @novelforms.

His design work can be found at

https://perrymiller.design/

Purchase Common Measure Vol. 1 at:

https://commonmeasure.press/

I want to talk about two seemingly distant literary giants: Marcel Proust (early 20th-century French novelist) and Ovid (ancient Roman poet), and how both posit love as a transformative force—but a dark transformation, a process that dehumanizes the beloved rather than uniting with them.

Both Proust and Ovid show us what happens when love fails, grows toxic, and the lover, left with nothing tangible, transforms the beloved into an object of aesthetic or symbolic value. In Proust’s case, the “object” is an artistic creation; in Ovid’s, it’s an actual physical transformation.

Proust’s masterpiece is divided into seven volumes, each chronicling the social and internal life of a narrator known as “Marcel,” and venturing, through free indirect style, into the psychological lives of Marcel’s contemporaries, especially, as it relates to this essay, Swann.

It is troubling to note that there are zero stories of successful romantic love in the novel, and this in my opinion comes from Proust’s contentions that we cannot know another person, and that ultimately art is the only consolation. By the final volume, the narrator has abandoned the idea of finding romantic love. Instead, he retreats into solitude to write his novel—the very one we’re reading. In Proust’s world, art becomes the triumphant alternative when romantic fulfillment proves impossible.

I think his reflection, after he parts with finally with Gilberte, his first youthful love (and the daughter of Swann), is telling:

“When I succumbed to the attraction of a new face, when it was with the help of some other girl that I hoped to discover the Gothic cathedrals, the palaces and gardens of Italy, I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that is has been inspired by her in a logicallyx necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those association, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman,” (p. 299, Place-Names, The Place.)

Note that Marcel is thinking of love as a feeling, not as an act and an ongoing process of creation. Meanwhile, he also immediately associates love with the act of contemplating aesthetic beauty, disclosing a propensity to reduce love to ‘a beautiful thing,’ which is not, meanwhile, true beauty—for though a Gothic cathedral or an Italian garden may indeed be beautiful to look upon, it is not Beauty itself, namely the form of Beauty, which is bound up with the True and the Good, of which nexus love is an expression.

Of the love stories in the book, I submit that none are successes, insofar as there is growth and unity between the lovers. The novel is peppered with extramarital affairs, hidden desires, and marriages of convenience. Proust rarely offers a contrapuntal healthy, enduring relationship—everyone is trapped in an endless cycle of suspicion and heartbreak. My friend M has challenged me on this, suggesting that there is one love story that subverts this dismal conclusion. Though I don’t think enough information is presented in the text to fully substantiate this, I will discuss this love story at the end. Meanwhile, the list of failed loves is overwhelming: Marcel and Gilberte, Marcel and Albertine, Swann and Odette, Charlus and Morel, Morel and Jupien’s niece, Oriane and the Duc de Guermantes, and more. For the pride of place that romantic interaction is given in the work, there is not much love or hope produced. Let’s look at Swann first.

Swann and Odette

Swann is a cultured socialite celebrated in aristocratic salons. Odette is not well-liked by those same circles. Despite their mismatch, Swann falls in love, despite recognizing that she ‘isn’t even his type’ (p. 276). But why? It’s because Swann sees love as aesthetic beauty, obsession, and feeling, rather than a union of souls that will ennoble them both. Indeed, Swann finds Odette tasteless, tacky. But he falls in love with the idea of falling in love with her:

“But at the time of life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man an content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return, this mutual sympathy, if it is no longer as in early youth the goal towards which love inevitably tends, is nevertheless bound to it by so strong an association of ideas that it may well become the cause of love if it manifests itself first. In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her,” (p. 277, Swann in Love).

It is love as obsession, possession, feeling, rather than mutual fulfillment. Swann, for example, becomes insanely jealous of Odette’s relationship with Forcheville, an aristocrat. He literally goes out and searches for Odette around Paris when he doesn't know where she is, and suspects she’s with Forcheville. It is in an effort to possess her, not to love and ennoble her, that Swann makes love to and eventually marries Odette. Indeed, even at the end of his love story, when they are wed, he returns to his initial lament: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” (p. 543, Swann in Love).

Meanwhile, the aestheticization of the lover is ever present, when Swann sees Odette as a fresco by Botticelli:

“She struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the old masters… the individual features of the men and women whom he knew.” (315)

Marcel and Albertine

Marcel, the narrator, a vague but inaccurate analog for Proust himself, has two great and several minor love interests over the seven volumes, none of which materialize in any productive way. The first major love story is with Gilberte, Swann’s daughter, the reflection on which you’ve just read above.

But the novel’s most haunting romance is between Marcel and Albertine. Marcel, plagued by jealousy, manipulates Albertine, essentially holding her captive in his Paris apartment. He suspects she might be in love with other women, and his inability to know her—truly and fully—becomes an all-consuming torment. From her first moments with him in his apartment, Marcel acknowledges that his love is corrupt, and based exclusively on jealous possession:

“Without feeling to the slightest degree in love with Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasure the moments that we spent together, I had nevertheless remained preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time,” (p. 18, The Captive).

(It is interesting to note that Marcel is especially concerned that she is having lesbian affairs behind his back, or, with even more pernicious jealousy, that she has lied to him about having had lesbian affairs in the past. His reason for this is that he feels he cannot provide the same type of romance for Albertine that she receives from women; whereas he could beat another man at his game, since he is a man, he cannot beat a woman at hers.) Marcel wants to know what she is doing, but not how she is feeling, or who she is. This may spring from Marcel’s contention that another person cannot be known. This is where Marcel misses the true nature of love, which is beauty integrated with truth (and morality). This can be seen, for example, in the evolution of his opinion of the Guermantes family over the course of the third volume: he adores and worships their name and their history, but as he discovers that Oriane, the Duc, Charlus, St. Loup and the rest are simply normal, average people with expensive things, he becomes disillusioned—instead of progressing from affection to love, he progresses from infatuation to disillusionment, because he does not want to know the truth, he wants to preserve and sustain a fantasy.

The impossibility to knowing someone can be seen also in his inveterate distrust of Albertine, whom he keeps as his prisoner. Moreover in statements such as, “Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying,” (The Fugitive, 607). But at the same time, it seems like Marcel has never endeavored to know the real Albertine, nor Swann to know the real Odette. Everyone, is aetheticizing their lover, keeps them in the realm of the idea, and never reifies them; to love is to love a human—granted, with a soul, but embodied, nonetheless… and yet we read:

“It is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream,” (The Fugitive, 612).

Ultimately, as could be foretold of a woman kept locked away, Albertine leaves Marcel. He tries to get her to come back to him, thinking that he loves her after all, but she is tragically and surprisingly killed in a fall from a horse. Thus ends the protagonist’s last significant attempt at romantic love, whereafter he begins his retreat from social life, into the seclusion from which he will produce his novels, and effect Albertine’s transformation into a work of art. Albertine’s transformation comes not, however, by an offhand comparison to Botticelli: rather, she is transformed, in a metafictional sublimation, into the very novel that the reader is now holding in his hands.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Tragedy of Transformation

If Proust writes about emotional turmoil in salons and Paris apartments, Ovid sets his stories among gods and nymphs who roam forests and rivers. Yet the emotional core is strikingly similar. Indeed, the love of possession that Phoebus and Pan feel respectively for Daphne and Syrinx transforms these women into aesthetic objects, too.

“Phoebus’s first love was Daphne, daughter of Peneus, and not through chance but because of Cupid’s fierce anger. Recently the Delian god, exulting at his victory over the serpent, had seen him bending his tightly strung bow and said ‘Impudent boy, what are you doing with a man’s weapons?’” (I:~438-472)

Phoebus makes the mistake of insulting Cupid and his little bow, and for revenge, Cupid strikes Phoebus with an arrow to make him fall in love with Daphne, and Daphne with an arrow to make her repulsed by Phoebus.

“[Cupid] took two arrows with opposite effects from his full quiver: one kindles love, the other dispels it. The one that kindles is golden with a sharp glistening point, the one that dispels is blunt with lead beneath its shaft. With the second he transfixed Peneus’s daughter, but with the first he wounded Apollo piercing him to the marrow of his bones,” (Ibid.).

Daphne flees from Phoebus, and never yields to him, no matter what he says or does. When he finally captures her, to avoid his assault, Daphne begs her father Peneus to use his “divine powers change me” and “destroy this beauty that pleases [Phoebus] too well!” (I:525-552).

Her father accedes to her request, and transforms her into a laurel tree. Phoebus then takes laurel branches from her transformed body and fashions wreaths around his head and quiver—even now, branches from Daphne’s mutilated body still symbolize imperium, and poetry: a ‘poet laureate’ wreaths himself in Phoebus’s shame, in Phoebus’s aggressive reduction of Daphne into an aesthetic object.

So too with Pan, who, trying to capture the nymph Syrinx, causes her to request a similar transformation—this time into reeds. Syrinx, having been transformed into reeds, is then cut from the river by Pan, who fashions her new body into a woodland pipe, a flute.

And how different is Marcel’s transformation of Albertine into a novel?

One of the most intriguing parallels is the idea that love, when it fails to become a mutual exchange, can turn possessive. Then, to cope with that failure, the lover “immortalizes” the beloved in art—be it a tree, a flute, or a novel.

Both authors underscore the human impulse to create when we cannot fully possess. Yet the moral or emotional cost is huge: the living, autonomous individual is effectively lost in favor of an artistic symbol.

Proust ultimately suggests an almost total impossibility of genuine connection. After finishing his epic novel, it’s tempting to walk away thinking that maybe he’s right—that human intimacy can never truly succeed, and art is the only solace for our inevitable heartbreak.

But I’m not so convinced.

So what is the right connection between love and art?

Love and art are near to eachother as concepts. Both are celebrations of truth, beauty, and goodness, or at least they can be. There is no need for one to interfere with the other in any significant way.

However, if your love does not celebrate truth, beauty, and ethics, neither will your art. In my own experience, it is even possible to have a false celebration of these three categories in love, and to have this simulacrum carry over into art. That is, you may be talking regularly with your lover about your art, but rather than focusing on the honesty and beauty therein, you will be talking about the mechanical craft instead. Your love, meanwhile, is taking the same shape, evolving in the same way. You are loving as if it were a mechanical craft, instead of an art form.

Love and art will only in the proper environment both be transformative powers. The direction of Proust and Ovid’s transformations are unilateral, but a bilateral transformative power, a symbiosis of love and art is entirely possible. You learn something about your life during your relationship, and you commit it to the page or the canvas. You learn something about yourself or your partner through reading or looking at a painting, and you bring that insight back into your conversation with your lover, using the insight to deepen the commitment to honesty.

Love does have a symbiotic and bilateral transformative power. So does art. Both partners can grow through it, becoming more of what they are. Or they can become hollow and aestheticized objects. It depends on the honesty, ethics, and aesthetics that you bring to the relationship, and to the craft.

Both of these practices—loving and creating rightly—are difficult to actualize, but the reward for doing so is greater a hundredfold than the cost thereof: you may, unlike Marcel, live a beautiful life.

Postscript: Jupien and Charlus

The Baron de Charlus is one of the wealthiest and most popular men in Paris. He is a member of the Guermantes family. Jupien is a tailor, whose shop is located in the Hôtel de Guermantes. He and Charlus meet and surprisingly make love in Sodom and Gomorrah. Their relationship lasts for the remainder of the novel. My friend M argues with me that this is the one instance of successful Eros in the novel.

M: I also have a Q for you. I agree that the novel is very interested in failed love, and almost all the romantic relationships in the novel fail. But I think there is one relationship—a big one-that does not fail! It is, to me, an instance of highly successful romantic love! I'm interested if you can think of the one I'm thinking of, hiding in plain sight. Because I think it is part of the novel's implicit "argument." Maybe it's not some people's image of love, but IDK, interested in your thoughts.

Torben [five hours later]: I give up.

M: What do you think of Jupien and Charlus? Obviously the relationship involved power and class dynamics and is strategic.

Torben: I thought of that for a bit actually.

M: But they also get along super well and their relationship lasts decades.

Torben: I see what you're getting at. Yeah.

M: And I can't rly remember it but I remember feeling earnest romance vibes.

Torben: "What a big bum you have!”—one of my fav lines in the book.

M: That scene is mind-blowing. The Shakespearean 'spying' that transpires. How it happens like 1000 pages in. So u experience it as just as shocking a revelation as the narrator does—ab how the world works.

Torben: Yeah deadass.

M: He even describes their bond as sort of chemically unique and unlikely, the perfect insect for the perfect flower. How each is the other's 'kink.' Or like how Charlus is lucky to find this guy who is into older men. Or later, Jupien procuring the BDSM scenes for Charlus.

Torben: Yeah that procuring is what kind of threw me off the scent, when you asked who I thought you meant. Like it seemed like he was instrumental to Charlus at the end. Like a means not an end. But maybe Charlus just getting old.

M: Yeah I think it's not entirely clear. I remember experiencing it as like a kind of gesture of caring and selflessness from Jupien. He provided the scenario and participants for his lover. And like in order for Jupien and Charlus's relationship to remain above-board they have to persist in inhabiting their class roles of servant/ruler. Which sometimes they perform but sometimes become the natural, normalized positions they inhabit. So Jupien doing these things is his 'job' because that's the 'cover' they take on to hide their gay relationship. And sometimes his 'job' duties intermingle with being a lover. There's a spectrum. IDK just one reading. Obviously Jupien 'uses' Charlus for shelter, access to power, resources, lifestyle benefits. And Charlus 'uses' Jupien's body and manual labor. But whether or not they deeply emotionally connect on a romantic level is sort of obscured from us, and if their relationship in aggregate is more fulfilled than say Albertine-narrator is not clear. But I think there are grounds for arguing it's the most successful romantic relationship in the book.

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“A colossal illumination
                           will helm
             this new body into which I
                          dawn
parsed in implicate glow
                          drawn
             like water from the well
                           slow      then

streaming from form to form—”

I'm transfixed by this sublimate “new body,” here pulled in two directions by the enjambment of “dawn.” A body becomes the formless stream it always was, a passage playing off in-betweens rather than resting in any given form. I wanted to hear your thoughts on the relation between (fleshy, felt) body and (poetic, [quasi-]metaphysical) form.

Ben: You've provided a lovely reading of that passage – thank you! There are, as you say, flows whose shape and directional multiplicity are always constituting and reconstituting the body, but I do not believe that they are incorporeal at any point. In other words, I am not convinced that there is a "metaphysical form" toward which the body is oriented or by which the body emerges into itself. Rather, following the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, I am of the opinion that there are different articulations of corporeality: the somatic, on the one hand, and the psychic, on the other. The flow between those two articulations of the individual is a key dynamic if we want to think about the production (and destruction) of subjectivity. The somatic flow pertains to physical processes that subtend the individual and so connect it to the wider milieu of life, while the psychic flow is a process that pushes the somatic flow toward a more strictly separated phase of individuation – this difference causes tension between them, but it is a tension that allows for the togetherness of individuals, connected as they are by the somatic substrate that they all feel and share between them, and separate as they are by virtue of their confinement within distinct psyches. Perhaps, if there is a poetic flow, it occurs when we allow the psychic articulation of subjectivity to give way to the somatic for a moment, and in doing so enact a controlled mode of self-annihilation: as we attune ourselves to the somatic flow that runs through us and connects us to the eruptions, interruptions, circulations, mixtures and separations of the larger world around us, we find that the temporary dissolution of psychic individuality takes on a form in and of itself, one whose pulse is in time with a larger pulse. This is what we could call the 'poetic form' of the body, and it is truly of the body: internal to the instant of its welling-up, irreplicable as each flutter of a leaf that dangles just above running water, not metaphysical but wholly and stubbornly material. To sit within such a telluric attunement is to feel our own becoming, which is constant, catalyzed over and over again by each and every instance of change. The stanza that you quoted is my attempt to describe the pulse of the body's constant becoming ("streaming from form to form") as it is felt from the standpoint of the somatic flow that connects the individual to the material substrate of being ("a colossal illumination will helm this new body into which I dawn") and renders it legible to the broader milieu in which it is situated ("parsed in implicate glow"). Every body is water from the well, and the well is every body.

Fan: I appreciate your principled refusal of the “metaphysical,” and that it's a matter of corporeality – of the staunchly material – whether that’s in the valence of the somatic or the psychic or in their oscillation. For me, this position instantiates an “ethics of immanence” that structures our relations, that is definitively anti-identitarian; that attends to locality of where we happen to be and its socio-geographic histories; that is ready to give up individuation when the larger body calls for merge & dissolve. Poetics is ever connected to ethos, and yours suggests a new way to make life, and to make elsewise of a life than what we've been already habituated into.

It feels like this oscillatory corporeality is given form in how flamenco – itself so passionately embodied, at the axis of music and dance – appears across these poems. You write about it a bit in the intro of your book, where you mention your forging of recombinant histories across Gitano (i.e. Romani) and Jewish populations, but I'm curious to hear more: what is flamenco doing with you as one of the intertexual motifs woven throughout the poems?

Ben: Your formulation of immanence is really fascinating insofar as it chimes strongly with what I have in mind – an ethics that finds its footing in the local and makes life there, an "oscillatory corporeality" (I love this phrase!) – and then diverges somewhat. Before I answer your question, I want to explore this divergence, because I think it's important. If locality (the way you describe it reminds me a bit of how Adriana Cavarero frames her concept of the “absolute local”), as you say, calls for a given subject's dissolution into the larger body, then such a situation presents a problem for groups such as the Jews and the Roma, who have insisted in various ways on reserving the right to remain at least partially exterior to the European Christian communal inside either by maintaining a certain belief system in the face of Christian supersessionist dogma or by holding onto cultural practices that diverge from those accepted within the Christian interior. In the face of a larger body – a state, a religious community, etc. – the option for exteriority needs to remain, and some part of the immanent subject must be capable of resisting dissolution into the collective. Otherwise, the call of the local also becomes a call for cultural erasure.

This is a problem that I've been confronting in my engagement with Spinoza, who is a major influence on my thinking throughout Seguiriyas, and who is often regarded as one of the foundational figures of process-based philosophy in the modern West. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza describes the subject's relationship with the state as follows: “it’s evident that the Right of a state, or of the supreme powers, is nothing more than the Right of nature, determined not by the power of each person, but by the power of a multitude, led as if by one mind.” On its face, this pronouncement runs entirely counter to my insistence that the option for exteriority from the collective must be preserved at all costs. Spinoza, however, leaves us a sliver of space in which we might read him against himself. I can’t help noticing that the “as if” (“veluti,” in Latin) is doing a lot of work to tie the state’s “Right of nature” over the multitude to the mind’s sway over its respective sphere of influence – and we must assume that the mind’s corresponding sphere of influence would be the body. Even as he seems to foreclose the individual subject's option for exteriority to state power, the “veluti” challenges us to explore the role of the mind within the explicatory analogy that he has laid out for us. If we take the simile as it is given and accept that all members of the multitude do indeed imbue the state with a collectivized mind whose rationality circumscribes their activities, then we must treat the multitude as a body attached to the mind of the state. The multitude is composed of many minds, and each of them is attached to a separate body; a state formation that acts as the many-minded multitude’s collectivized mind must therefore pertain to a collectivized body composed of that same multitude’s many bodies.

With that out of the way, we can turn to Spinoza's Ethics and use his portrait of the mind-body relation in that book against him here in order to grant the subject more autonomy relative to its apparent dissolution into the state. In the Ethics, Spinoza holds that the mind must always possess a concept of the body in its totality, but the body, despite being conceived by the mind, can remain independent of cognition in its parts (one does not need to cognize the pancreas to cognize the body, and in cognizing the body, one does not necessarily cognize the pancreas in isolation). The body, meanwhile, can react affectively to the mind and, in doing so, change it: the containment, augmentation or alteration of the body’s power causes the mind to produce an idea of the body’s state, and then the mind’s idea of that state, in conjunction with external stimuli, impacts the body on an affective level, which in turn prompts the mind to alter its idea of the body in response to the shift in affect, and so on and so forth.

In a political context, then, even if the subjects’ minds are given over to whatever state might be governing them, the subjects’ bodies are in a situation whereby they are being controlled by the state and simultaneously impacting it with their inevitable response to its control. Thus, while the minds of subjects are fundamentally interior to the state's ‘natural Right’ of governance, their bodies constitute a threshold between interiority and exteriority relative to that same state. They are always being brought inside the state insofar as they are being conceived by the state’s mind, and yet they are always moving outside the state in their reaction to the ways in which the state conceives of them. In many cases, the state’s conception (and here I mean organization, regulation, etc.) of the bodies under its purview will be violent, and, when a body is caught at the threshold between interiority and exteriority (as so many often are), its reaction will be equally violent. This violence will always be directed straight back at the mind, at the state, and toward the somatic impact of their decisions. Moreover, as Spinoza belabors in the Ethics, the mind cannot ever be decoupled from the body. This means that the individual subject’s mind, in conceiving of its own body, must on the one hand conceive of the state at least partially by way of its body's interiority or exteriority to it and on the other hand impose its conception of the state onto whatever awareness it might possess of that bodily interiority or exteriority.

In all of this, we find another manifestation of the tension between the psychic and the somatic that I was discussing earlier. We also discover a perfect exemplar of what you've just described: an "oscillatory corporeality" that must construct a somatic and psychic relation between each subject and the collective regardless of whether they are insider, outsider or a mixture of both, even as it simultaneously structures the relation between the psychic and the somatic. I suppose what's happening here is that I am trying my best to make sure that this framework of material immanence preserves the reality of the violence that collectivity can impose while simultaneously understanding the collective to be a vehicle that might in some circumstances be used to counter violence and encourage solidarity or even reconciliation.

That was a very long digression – my apologies. Now I need to answer your actual question! I'll give you a very simple response and then elaborate on it: one of flamenco's primary roles in my book is to demonstrate how the body can physically fail in its attempt to contain all of Andalusia’s interlocking histories of cultural mixture and dispersion – between Roma, Muslims, Christians and Jews – along with the particular social reality of privation and discrimination that the Iberian Roma continue to face to this very day. As I mention in my Author’s Note before the reader can even get to the poems, flamenco occupies a really interesting position whereby it bears witness to all these different histories of transit and dislocation predating its emergence – specifically, the forcible conversion and expulsion of Spain’s Jewish and Muslim populations as well as the many ordinances leveled against the Roma at the behest of the Christian crown – and then binds them up into a practice that gathers meaning internal to Romani communal life and inscribes the Iberian Roma's own history of transit, displacement and oppression in more recent centuries.

I can say all of that to you right now and you will understand it, but how can one show it while preserving the inarticulate but deeply felt lacunae that riddle such historical memory? I try to do that in the poetry, of course, but flamenco's answer is much more direct: put it all in the body and let it come out through the mouth. What I hear in the voice of the flamenco cantaor is the body filling itself with history until it reaches beyond the threshold of its failure and forces the voice to break, and then continuing on toward the next breakage. It is the failure of the throat that ensures the transmission of all these disembodied histories, I believe, because the breakage demonstrates the degree to which they remain present – their overabundance – and ushers the rest of the community into the ragged flow of somatic memory by virtue of their listening. I use the flamenco voice as a steady motif throughout the collection because it can act as that which carries histories into bodies and between bodies, models transit across time and space, and functions as a sonic envelope in which subjects can navigate togetherness and apartness. In this way, it models a method by which diasporic memory can be transmitted. I then repurpose and expand that model such that it carries Ashkenazi Jewish history, too, hearing it as a voice that frays in its overabundance, and experiencing it within a sensorium that does the same, alongside the histories that flamenco itself has encoded. In doing so, my goal in Seguiriyas has been to bring forth a kind of historicized solidarity, or a companionship in memory, while also acknowledging its pitfalls – a “wandering hum,” as I call it in one poem, which might turn inward and listen only to the sound that it is making by itself or venture outward and find another song elapsing in unison with its own.

In any case, you're right that there's an oscillation in the flamenco voice – it’s moving back and forth between its capacity as an embodied, purely somatic cry predating speech and its capacity as a communicative medium that comes after language has intervened. That oscillation maps onto the oscillation between the somatic and the psychic, and it also produces a temporal loop between anteriority and posteriority; it is this loop, which recursively circulates between its poles, that allows the voice to contain, carry and transmit historical memory. In “Pellizco,” which is a poem that is directly about the flamenco voice, I rely on three separate metaphors to express that very idea, some of which purposefully reprise variations on the motifs that I introduce early on in Seguiriyas in poems such as “Scenario: Entry,” to which you so generously drew our attention in your first question:

                             “duct between there
                             and here

   A pool that wells up;
   the well that contains the pool”

And:

“Water
unsure of its own age, pulled
to a blunted thrum, a hollow stretched flat,
a serrated edge along which
everything goes
and everything returns”

Fan: I'm struck by what you've said about collectivity, its capacity to be both a vehicle of violence and of resistance; to "reach beyond the threshold of failure," to transpose a phrase you used for the flamenco cantaor's aesthethics. In this case, it's the threshold of the failure of Imperialism that people are trying to push past in a hope to reach a new horizon of social life and civil belonging that's not premised on greed. Is your poetics interested in the function of gathering and organizing collectivity, perhaps in subtle ways not recognizable under the harsh light of explicit capital-P Politics?

Ben: These are difficult delineations that you’re making. To what degree does Imperialism possess unity across its various expressions and mimeses? How can we know where “capital-P Politics” ends and another mechanism of collectivity begins? I think these are related questions. On the one hand, then, we ought to acknowledge the differences between a mimesis of Imperialism and a direct reproduction of it, but on the other hand, it all becomes something of a hall of mirrors, reflecting the same harsh light every which way, such that nothing remains untouched. A collective based on care is just as capital-P Political as a collective based on violence, and depending on where one is standing, there might not be any difference between the two. The harsh light of Politics recognizes all of it, finds ways to translate it and integrate it. What’s more, it is under that same light that we go about writing poetry, so why should my poetics be capable of imagining an ‘otherwise’? And if there isn’t an otherwise, then what kind of collectivity can poetry strive for?

This might feel like defeatism, but that is not what I am getting at here. I sometimes think of George Oppen, who stopped writing for many years due to his sense that poetry would always be unable to right the world’s wrongs or make ‘useful’ community. In moments of despondency, I find myself leaning toward that same conclusion, but then I remember that poetry can take stock of what is before it and fashion proximities that would otherwise be unlikely to exist. These proximities must be dense in order to remain durable: a simple mutuality of interest or passing resemblance will never be sufficient. Just as a good metaphor requires – and often fashions for itself – a deep interrelation between tenor and vehicle, so too do these encounters call for corresponding entanglements with the frictions of history, for the voicing of spatiotemporal junctures at which one group’s memory might be tugged toward another’s. In Seguiriyas, I do try to address what this might look like in my attempts to produce multi-referential poems whose content unites Jewish, Muslim and Romani histories in Spain. These are interrelations that can only exist in dialogue with the legacy of Capital-P Politics, insofar as their capacity for solidarity resides in their engagement with histories that both inform and are informed by the evolving political realities that each group has had to navigate.

Of course, there are many modes of sociality that subsist in excess of what has been imposed by the current order, but their forms are always going to be circumscribed by that imposition. Indeed, such a situation – being circumscribed by vertical power and attempting even so to forge horizontal social relations and kinship bonds – is precisely what has shaped things like the flamenco voice; what’s more, as I explore in Seguiriyas, it is also what allows for a chime of recognition across situations, a solidarity whose terms are given by and claimed despite the movement of history. However, the collectivity produced under those auspices is always invaded in some way. Take flamenco as an example: in the mid-20^th century, Francisco Franco’s fascist government was all too happy to use it as a key element of its nationalistic propaganda campaign. Such complex and compromised entanglements need to be acknowledged by any given collective if it desires to make good decisions about itself – I know that much.

As we speak, I am still in the process of thinking things through, trying to build poems that can find their way toward a properly realized formulation of a sociality that can be resilient in the face of that which seeks to tear it apart while also reckoning with its own inevitable flavor of violence in a productive manner (all iterations of collectivity have to figure out where to put the violence that allows for their existence, and some go about it more destructively than others). It seems to me that a good collective must take pains to address distorted constructions of its own past, confront problems relating to memory, kinship and attachment, and social reproduction. It must preserve the option for exteriority even as it cultivates a welcoming interior and harbors no illusions about what would be inimical to its existence. For me, the first step toward understanding what that would be like is to pick apart the constitutive logic of collectivity as it is understood in the Imperial and supersessionist tradition, so that is the juncture at which I’ve begun – we’ll see what the writing yields. Doing that kind of excavational work is certainly not a substitute for direct action, though; rather, I hope it might serve as some kind of esoteric supplement, for those who want one.

Ben Meyerson’s Seguiryas is available from Black Ocean Press: https://www.blackocean.org/catalog1/seguiriyas

You can learn more about Ben on his website: https://benmeyersonmedia.com/

This interview will be printed in Common Measure Vol. 2. You can buy Vol. 1 at https://commonmeasure.press/

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The practice that I chose was dancing for fun in my house. Through these sessions, I attempted to find freedom from my inner critic. I did this by prioritizing sensation and letting go of the desire for a particular outcome. I found that over time I was able to find joy as well as a fluidity and ease in my movement that had been difficult for me to find in the past.

I decided to make this project as a dance film because I felt like the classroom would be too small of a space for the expansiveness that I’d been feeling. I also felt like it would be too early in this process for me to bring that sense of ease and vulnerability to a live audience. So, making a film gave me a safe container to work within. It also allowed me to experiment with being in different environments while I was dancing. I loved dancing with the sun, the sounds of the birds and the crunching leaves.

A lot of different themes came up for me during this process. What I decided to focus on was patterns of movement and what meaning they might hold about my emotional and psychological inner world. In the film, you’ll see repetition of movement as well as repetition of words to symbolize the cyclical and repetitive nature of my thoughts. The movement in the film stems from my somatic practice as well as memories of physical vocabularies from my dance training and other choreographic explorations. I tried to thread these “movement memories” into my new patterns of movement and see how it all sat together.

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The painting:

The Blind Girl (1856) By John Everett Millais1

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It was a Tuesday, so Riverside was full of people shuffling along the dirt path that functioned as a sidewalk. Full of cars stopped in traffic, their windows up to keep the heat and dust out. Full of motor bikes, weaving around the cars and pedestrians. Full of women carrying fruit. Full of men sitting on milk crates. Full of little boys selling god knows what. 

Riverside was in the Westlands district of Nairobi. It acted as a sort of through street. On one end was a series of embassies and high end hotels, and at the other it connected to the main road through the city, Waiyaki Way, which was a sort of highway, except when it rained, when hundreds of cars stopped moving for no reason whatsoever. 

But that day there was no rain. It was hot. The Dusit complex, like most other gated compounds in the city, had an office building, a hotel, and a restaurant. The three men broke through the gates, passed the guards, and then one of them blew himself up. That was what we heard. The first explosion. From our office building just down the street. A loud bang, and we all ran upstairs to the roof. 

–

His name was Bigo. 

His first name was Geoffrey, but no one called him that. 

“Good morning Bigo.”

“Sir. How ah youuu?” then he’d start laughing self-consciously.

Bigo was always late. He’d arrive at our office, flustered, apologizing, telling me that the bus wasn’t on time, so he had to take a bodaboda all the way from Ruaka. Laughter. 

For as long as I knew him, Bigo wore the same three dress shirts on rotation. He had these big, round glasses that were held together by tape, and one side of his afro was always flat, like he’d just woken up. 

He was a salesman. Our company was selling technology to restaurants, and Bigo used to run his own restaurant, so I thought he’d be good. But he was always behind on his targets. Panicking at the end of the month, trying to hit quota. “How ah youuu?” Laughter. 

After work, Bigo would bring us to these bars, inside a mall, or on the rooftop of a hotel. He always wanted to go out. He’d make me taste different types of beer, and teach me dance moves.

I remember during my first month, he asked me to come to a meeting with him. We were sitting outside the restaurant, Bigo checking his watch every few minutes, asking when the owner would be back. And while we waited he told me about his life. How he had a son who was one year old. He showed me a picture. Then he showed me a picture with his baby mama. Laughter. He wasn’t married yet because he was still saving up money for a dowry. 

When the owner finally arrived, an Indian man, it seemed like he knew Bigo. Like he’d seen him several times before and was already sick of him. But this time was different. He had a Mzungu with him. A white man. 

–

From the rooftop of our office, we could see smoke rising above the trees. People running along Riverside Drive below. We could hear gunshots. Even with everything going on, it was hard to not notice how lush the city was. How much green there was everywhere. 

Do we have everyone? Is everyone here? I looked around and started counting. Sally, Andrew, Kevin, Bigo. Bigo? Where’s Bigo?

Another explosion. 

I took out my phone and tried calling him, but it went straight to voicemail. Tried calling him again. He never had any call time. 

We got a message from the security team. We were instructed to stay in the office and lower the blinds. Stay away from windows and doors. No one was allowed to leave. 

While we sat there in the dark, my colleagues started calling people. Checking to make sure their family and friends were safe. Checking twitter for updates. Every now and then we’d hear more gunshots. 

–

The morning of the explosion, Bigo came into the office late. “Sir, how ah youuu?” Laughter. 

When we had our weekly meeting, he was flipping through his notebook, trying to give me updates, struggling to read his own writing. Put it in the computer, Bigo. You have to put it in the computer. Otherwise it doesn’t count. 

I kept thinking he would improve at his job. He knew everyone. The bodaboda drivers, the shop owners. We’d go to local markets and he’d talk to the people selling, to make sure I didn’t get ripped off too badly. But he was behind target again. I told him that if he didn’t improve soon, we would need to make a change. 

Bigo kept apologizing. Saying he would make sure things were recorded. After lunch he told me he was going back out again to try to meet with some more businesses. 

–

It wasn’t until midnight that we were finally allowed to leave the office. The Kenyan military had been called in and were stationed along the street. Men in green vests and helmets and machine guns hanging from their necks. We walked outside, and my colleagues all turned left out to the main road to catch the bus, and I went right, walking back towards the hotel I’d been staying at for the last several months.

I’d never seen Riverside Drive so empty. It was normally full of crowds, of people bumping into you every few minutes. But now it was quiet. I made eye contact with a man in a vest, I smiled and nodded, but he just stared back at me blankly. 

When I reached my hotel, there were more guards stationed outside. Lots of Americans were staying there, so the consulate must’ve sent them. As the gate closed behind me, I thought about Bigo. 

He’d finally called me back in the evening. He said he was safe, in another part of the city. He was laughing on the phone. 

I thought about how I would have felt if I found his name in the list of casualties a week later. One of dozens of Kenyans that died, though the news networks would focus on the one American citizen. I thought about our company offering their deepest condolences, then going right back to work. I thought about his child. 

I walked through the main entrance of the building, with the perfectly clean floors, and the pool that no one used, and far too many staff for the amount of people staying there, and I realized I would fly back home at some point. In a few months maybe, or a year. Eventually, Bigo’s contract would end and he would have to find another job. Still trying to save up for a dowry. He’d call me every now and then, a grainy WhatsApp call in the middle of the night. Checking in, telling me about his life, seeing if I wouldn’t mind sending him some money. How ah youuu? Laughter. And I’d entertain him at first. Try to stay in touch. But eventually I’d stop answering. I’d let it ring, then message him back days later. He would fade from my life. The only thing left would be some pictures of us at a bar, or riding ATVs, or smiling just outside our office on Riverside Drive. 

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