like the way i told myself that i’d be out of this place before the bottle of shampoo was finished, now one quarter left, a grocery list like your ellipses builds up in its stead. 1 ¥100 China Mobile phone card, a pair of leggings, cherry tomatoes, 1 residence permit, 3 apples, 2 packages of 烤面片 (cumin or chicken flavour), apricots or peaches, 2 bottles of diet Coke, cashews or almonds or walnuts (salted), 绿豆糕, green basil pesto, 2 jars of Ying’er brand salted peanut butter (yellow lid), smoked 豆腐干, avocados, 1 can of Sapporo beer, masking tape, a pair of gardening gloves, multi-vitamins, Whisper brand maxi-pads, 1 big bottle of water, 红薯干, Crest Pro-Health toothpaste, a green stone necklace found in a field, letters and wasted words. Is a list equalising, 你说, like the illusion of a history book or a series of object relations? When a pink iron is held mid-air and knowing glances cross a courtyard, a smile is word is a years-long treatise on spontaneity. it’s not a sum as much as an infinitesimal differential, the derivative of the function that realises slowness.

你说 “小气”, but everything feels imbibed, or imbued, like the lost spaces between words we cannot really understand (“precisely as a function of the differential between their positions”). Ellipses. i try to keep track of the list, and yes, sometimes it feels good to try to do something good for someone else, but it’s always hard to tell when exactly we become barbarians. Rarely is it as simple as a list of objects, where sympathy is the square root of identification, a manner of being rude or respectful. weird + polite forever, it keeps us busy …. 你说?