i always think of you when i write. you.

to you.

you.

you.

you wish it was you, rather than just any old you, because that generic intimacy gets so tiring after awhile, or it’s what got you into trouble, a tiny, unnoticeable violence that you never realised would accumulate after so much time into that giant, violent thing that fell spilling on to the ground today (喂！你跌佐良心啊！).

a dichotomy of distance, ‘cuttings on the shop floor‘. it was me, as i wrote to a generic you (apparently called ‘vanilla’) that never understood how to distinguish between a friend, an accomplice, an acquaintance, someone we should have not wasted so much time on in the first place. on that side of the ocean they always laughed about it, quotation-marks-friend-quotation-marks filling the air in a disdainful, joking way.

yeah… it’s a loose term perhaps. look what’s happened to us. purple on one side, green on the other, jokes, the joker, shiso leaves.

i finally finished that jar of pickled shiso that K had made me, long after he had gone. guess we are all supposed to hate him now, just disappearing like that, but the shiso was so tasty and he had been so sweet and eager to make it for me before i left that day, i couldn’t help but hold a soft spot for him. it turned out to be the last time we would see one another.

at the time he was like a boy and a master, chopping the leaves finely with that sort of precision that always made you think of Q’s story about the butcher and 道 the tào. K proudly handed me the square plastic jar labelled with a little sticker bearing his name on it, instructing that if i had a stone i could clean it and put it in the jar as well; pressing down the leaves enhances the flavour. in the end the juice can be used also, so there, in the end, i poured out the last drops of bright pink pickling sap onto a bright purple and green salad, and together they made me think of the colour of an aura (you). A possible colour which i had never been able to see before myself but had been described to me by that blonde couple staring wide-eyed, many years ago, at some tinted space just a bit off from direct eye contact, in that way that some blind people do.

maybe my aura had bled out. fled, as sure-footed as he was when he left her, and now he’s off in some Wong Kar Wai movie, the one that’s tinted a muted aqua-grey colour, with lots of stony blues pressing down to enhance the flavour. he unhooked himself from her; she is pregnant and going to marry all of her ‘friends’ instead. but how do we unhook ourselves from ourselves? that bright purplish-pink is gone and filled only with the headache of being awake.

do you remember when we talked about being woke? what a funny presumption, don’t you think? i feel more ‘awake’ than ever before, and it’s shitty to not be able to sleep even if it increases the number of episodes for ‘things i don’t know‘ playing on repeat. the same same collapses in upon itself.

later, she wrote: ‘Stay fiery. I went to a Naomi Klein talk with sheets Thunberg last night and she reminded us the way to fight fire is with fire. 🔥 ‘

but the same same collapses in upon itself. it is just so hard to stay fiery. these weekends going out there, out there, around and behind and on the margins of front, the smell, these acculturations that kill me. weekend weekend, monday to friday. it had dawned upon me, after the summer of discontent, that the problem right now is that all that practice that i had built a practice upon didn’t make sense anymore. like i used to dislike contractions, and now they’re here all over the place, sense changes. is she more awake now, now that she is pregnant and he’s gone off to the Philippines? Where is that collusion between all those baby details we once found god in, and, baby mama, this big shit of a mess we’re in now?