"I'm allways moved by
manners on going away.

So I stay."

[Cenotaph] [Verisimilitude] [Periphraſis] Circumlocution] and a prolix life ["the after math of meaning. A lifetime finished between the space of two frames. The dark line where the eye persists in seeing what was never there To begin with"] [

I'm so sorry.

[
 Trepanned-
  [and all
breaks

down.

]
I don't intend to be for long.

All my words are empty now. I have none left. I can't keep thinking this hard. I want to drive a nail into my brain. [...
This constant intempesta nocte
and the dismal lurid phosphenes clouding my retina
]Lembre-se desta noite, pois ela é o início da eternidade.

My breaths are all exhalations
an unending expiration squeezed out beneath the jagged backs of collapsed dwellings.

My ribcage is distending or ingrown and biting into myself

and I've long since stopped bleeding.
I'm just dry now. All dried up. Or drowned. I don't know because I don't feel.

Doubled over myself;
Older than anything
Not seen.
Even s[i]miles must go.


I don't feel
I don't hope
I don't know
I don't.                                                                                                                                      Noli me-

The grass between my  fingers is ash now. The soil is Dust. The trees are all stumps and black weeds.
Eventually they aren't even that. Well - they just aren't.


The room is utterly empty. The is gone.The tiles in the hall are chipped and yellow. They prickle with the sound of someone sobbing around a corner. But which corner you don't know.

Somewhere
A family of threads are convolved
over and over and over and over.


Pills are drowned.
There's one more cure. More of a treatment really.
[tourniquet
To wrap tight around something that was

]                 Severed
so long ago. So so long
that you never knew until the blood dried up
or ran out.
Enough to last decades and now it's banished. Displaced. Started [st]reams somewhere else you'll never ever really see - just the mirage before it, the wavering air. Shimmering.[
I see now how]
one thing can hold the wound. One last habit lets go.

The first habit you ever make. The last habit to ever break.


Enough going in circles. Enough coiling. Some ends have been knotted like mandrake roots while others are saved for the coagulation.

I know I can piece this one last thing together. At least I know that final meaning. Or I'm about to. Or I'm not going to about to ever again, [n]ever mind if I never had to begin with. So I guess it's been over a while.
[
Prolepsis.

I don't know how] to finish [this all
[


so] I'll just stop

[Manthanô] [pharmakon] [the] rest [is] silence

"troubled thoughts ... stir
The hell within him, for within him
Hell he brings"

"myself am hell

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven"

Hell[ebore]. A dangerous cure.

Though not to me,

Nor Socrates. 

‘ὦ Κρίτων, ἔφη, τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα: ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε.’

       I know. I'm sorry. So many meanings. So little meaning. And no one left to figure it out?
I never Could                                                                                                     Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα

All by the end just falls

out of my hands

slips

[[[a-

way]

]

μανθάνω, ἦ δ᾽ ὅς: ἀλλ᾽ εὔχεσθαί γέ που τοῖς θεοῖς ἔξεστί τε καὶ χρή, τὴν μετοίκησιν τὴν ἐνθένδε ἐκεῖσε εὐτυχῆ γενέσθαι: ἃ δὴ καὶ ἐγὼ εὔχομαί τε καὶ γένοιτο ταύτῃ. καὶ ἅμ᾽ εἰπὼν ταῦτα ἐπισχόμενος καὶ μάλα εὐχερῶς καὶ εὐκόλως ἐξέπιεν. καὶ ἡμῶν οἱ πολλοὶ τέως μὲν ἐπιεικῶς οἷοί τε ἦσαν κατέχειν τὸ μὴ δακρύειν, ὡς δὲ εἴδομεν πίνοντά τε καὶ πεπωκότα, οὐκέτι, ἀλλ᾽ ἐμοῦ γε βίᾳ καὶ αὐτοῦ ἀστακτὶ ἐχώρει τὰ δάκρυα, ὥστε ἐγκαλυψάμενος ἀπέκλαον ἐμαυτόν—οὐ γὰρ δὴ ἐκεῖνόν γε, ἀλλὰ τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ τύχην, οἵου ἀνδρὸς

"...his ridiculous and terrible ‘last word’ means for those who have ears: ‘O Crito, life is a disease.’"

ApopheniaApopheniaApophenia. Apophenia. Apophenia. Apophenia. ApopheniaApopheniaApophenia.

Can you imagine what it's like to be falling in utter darkness? No sensation except the numbing wind rushing past, but eventually you stop feeling that. Just the black, seeping into your pores. You close your eyes and nothing changes. You open them and it's still impossible to see. I can't imagine it, but I don't have to. Nor do you. You won't.

Alternatively,

We're all standing on the edge of an abyss. Maybe it holds that same darkness you're falling through. I don't know. There could be others falling in that darkness. Right next to you, if only you could see them. But you can't, and for all you know Nothing is there. Or something much worse. Born in that night. Born of that night. With eyes that see through absence and gaze at the hollow cavern of your heart flooding with dark.

All of us. And the difference is, some of us are looking down off that precipice. Into the pit. No, a lot of people do that, once or twice. But some of us lean over. Hunch. Stoop.

The terribly thin point of balance pressed against something airy and thinner than Someone's hair brushing through your hand - beyond which, by just a fraction, you tip. And no matter how much you writhe, twist, coil, turn, reach,



You fall.
And maybe you realise, years later, still gone, unsure even if you move let alone fall in this void, long after you see the light at the top vanish, or was it there ever, or were you always falling, and the ground, the bottom, the floor so solid and silent rushing up to envelop you, not that you could see it sense it even because you feel you've always sensed it but its reaching up you're sure you're sure there's a bottom and it will enfold you in less than the briefest moment of a fugacious glance half-shared with a stranger you will never know you won't even feel it as it happens and then you won't feel anything at all

The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox?

Why is it that there are so many words for impermancence?

Transience, evanesence, fleeting, ephemeral, short-lived momentary temporary temporal passing brief transitory fugacious

All the while a great fly-by of time. Mono no aware.

Truant writes:

"Up in the sky-high,
Off to the side-eye,
All of us now sigh,
Right down the drain-ae"

Elsewhere in of Leaves Zampanò quotes Ernst Becker:

"The lower animals ... lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

On the most sun-filled days-

Sounds like the half-audible inhilation I take half-hearing the half-sentence of an already out of reach conversation. Familiar voice. But it makes sense. "Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic" after all. So up in the sky-high I'm smiling and laughing and laughing in a green-hazed field laughing so much with someone at my sides I'm almost gasping and choking with laughing so I look to the side-eye and

Oh.

Grey clouds.

"Until at last, limping past another turn.
Thuuuuuuuuuuuuunder.
"""""""""""""""""""

And also to the side-eye
No friend, acquaintance
or even accomplice.

                             Just the clouds.

All of us now sigh. It seems the whole world sighs with me. Or maybe it's the sound of ... yes-


Concrete sighs; rain begins to fall.


The walls of mist. Deliquescent deluge covers the evanescent earth, making it a great blue world. Though not so great.

The Hyades weep. They always do. It doesn't get easier for them, just more familiar.That's one kind of constancy I suppose.

But even I can't trick myself into believing that, and I'm the lord of lies. Oh yes, I've tricked myself into believing lots of things. So many of them, like rainfall, drops that seep through my clothes. Sure it's refreshing at first, and the air feels clearer. For a second you even believe that you can breathe. But the water reaches your skin. Cold creeps into your bones and ice learns to reside there. It might shatter. It might melt. I'm terrified of both. Yeah, I think it's the shattering. Of course, when it starts to melt it gets weaker, more likely to snap anyway. Every move I take might make it break apart, all of it, like my memory, my notes, I can't let that shatter be rended apart in a slash so sudden it stuns you  but before you can be stunned you're already oblivion and your pieces scatter into such small bits that you can't make them out through the rain that keeps falling oh god that so so cold rain isn't stopping it wont STOP

Nihilistic Paradox

Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am.

I think I understand. The tragedy of pretending we can translate. They're phonetics, of course. For the Latin. Non sum qualis eram. "In the spirit of the dark; in the spirit of the staircase [...] Which is to say -" I am not what I used to be.

And even once we recognise that the phonetics echo Latin? What then? We're left with a dead language. Sank into the margins of a tongue's motion, an ear's incline. Several layers of meaning, several depths to sink through. And incoherent. The tragedy of pretending we can translate, when we are circling - perhaps spiralling, drawing closer to that inevitable Point of singularity, or the reverse, unravelling and twisting out and out into eternity or the great abrupt plummet, each their own horror - on the scratched surface of something we name truth.

As if meaning could be gleaned from the mind of another solipsist.

When one code is uncovered, another replaces it. So many meanings - a cascade, drop after shard after drop of discollected ephemera. The deepest level of meaning is merely a shadow (yours) cast over the slash of a deeper abyss. Because to accept that non sum qualis eram is to accept that your knowledge returns to that old Near Hill. That what you knew is not what you know is not what you will learn is not what you will die thinking you know.

And the irony, the paradox. That the statement itself is an approximation, representation, attempt to depict a lack. An absence. How can you describe something as unexperienced, unknown, un-canny as nothing? As death? How can a simulacrimarum exist of emptiness, a likeness of that which in its hollow ways cannot even define itself? Except, perhaps, in its contrast with its opposite. But even the opposite is the thin wavering line of a half-imagined phosphene spluttering out in the intoxication of two great unencompassing wings of darkness. Shadow on the abyss. The meaning of the code is its lack of meaning, of all lack of meaning, of my lack of meaning. Yours. (My words, after all, mean as little to you as any others'. As they mean to me. The derivative incoherency of a thousand half-heard conversations, a lifetime of dappled light shimmering over the translucent inward-facing mirrors of my eyelids.) The one constant of our own unending change. We are never what we are. We are not. "Noli me-". And I'm telling you the meaning of this now. "Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead." Irony. That Maginot Line written by the already condemned, you remember. And I'm all ready condemned to or for that same pit. The long hallway of blank walls. Here at last flinging back the distorted echoes of what allways has been my own voice and nothing more than an impossible description of emptiness.

l'esprit de l'escalier

I should probably just say I'm not alright alright it's not that easy.

But I should explain. Summers and summers spent by s
Mine
It was my
"A that stands in my heart
My cathedral of silence
Every morning recaptured in dream
Every evening abandoned
A covered with dawn
Open to the winds of my youth."

[broke]
en
dans l'esprit de l'escalier [dans? en?]
It probably is too late, actually. Going off with friends' families' holidays not my own not even my own apostrophes but out of pity and never allowed to invite them not never allowed nor willing but their parents would ward them off from my windows, their windows me from their glass. Glad.

Some stray now backs
Up whining
In the fear that preludes the severance of several se-
Conds of anguish before
It is done.
Debilitated, or hopefully
Ended. I'd like to say it's worth a shot.

(Bad joke, sorry.)

Didn't have many others
but books
mostly. It's easier to write
like this
[fragments
less damaged or more
something whole can be pieced out of it-
no, each shard a whole story on its own
more capable to cut
words and swords
]a story
Easier to remain when not in the when not with the parents the basement or attic the thick walls the tree in the back of the garden and all the other burnt or before burnt with lines scored into them as if chains had bitten their way into the bark bark barking at my fears iseasier than silence. Mine. Sometimes I wanted to run away you know just blow go row everywhere not there not I. 
Seeking something resembling symmetry. But but but when I was me there were the pans and clinking and the knives and bruises hahaha oh god I lied don't believei  can't finish that sentence

Forget the pills
Forget the lost memories
(wish I couldn't)
"ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ʜᴏᴘᴇ. Very dangerous."

I know they're still plotting even though he's gone brother sister mother plotting girlfriend plotting blonde hair plotting The Garden plot shows black earth still if the ash isn't gone but I don't think the wind's come yet. My window's open. People are singing Happy Birthday outside, better blow out out their brief candle, but I can't make out the voices, who's whose who. An owl? Just the tone. No words. No subject. All signs. A guttural masculine voice warbling, half-snatched by the air. Better that way.

But this way,
what was the story?
Terza rima

Because I'm being dragged,
Faltering,
By ways my eye bags sag

Haltering,
The way my motions stay
Wavering

The sense of going a[way.
 ]

All surrounding me.      A shimmering. I can grin now. If I move an inch I'll crease the paper of my notes. Don't want that one  bit, so I make sure never to move. Pad of paper right here, I can add to the rows and rows of paper circling overlapping overlying underlieing and I won't sleep because then I might fall into it and through it, though the initial into it not such a problem- OH

The story

not a friend or a fear to find if I indulge
wrong word, just to fit the terza,
if I inhabited
(yes)
books
instead.

Suppose it began with teachers actually
no not Plato Aristotle Heraclitus-
 school. Not a friend when you scent of things long dried
but the little boy's Lizzie brain looking for approval finds the teacher curriculum books find him and he reads to get good grades to get good smiles to get good nods and it grows familiar with weekends and work and weekends and work and work alone the girl in Greece and someone else and he thought it might not end that she or he would go or when the colour faded that the sunlightlier memories at least would stay but "SHE SAID MEMORIES MEAN ALL BUT THEY ARE ALL DEAD" and characters too alive in the head reread or maybe something chemical there broke like a glow stick twig

just snapped one day
no reason

or perhaps the long  build up of a

break
another kind of snapped
scar formed long ago
reopened now
somehow.

In the fall the wind the drop
the reaching hand only scratches like a claw.

That's All.

bene dissaepti foedera mundi|traxit in unum thessala pinus|iussitique pati uerba pontum,|partemque metus fieri nostri|mare sepositum Depths' black burning lashes my wristtwistlistofmissedwistormissingwists remember-

[  plans made but forgotten ] [Inside, godless Fury, sitting on savage arms roaring hideously from bloody mouth, hands shackled behind his back with a hundred bands of bronze]

Nos e tanto uisi populo|digni premeret quos euerso|cardinem mundus? Nunc iam cessit pontus et omnes patitur leges|uenient annis saecula seris, quibus Oceanus|pateat tellus Tethysque nouos|detegat orbes nec sit terris|ultima Thule A way with lamenting, sever, read, red, ever-

[  solipsist  ] ["Away with lamenting; depart, fear. He is greedy for life who does not want to die when the world dies with him."] [
]

To run outside of the house

"an immense cosmic is a potential of every dream of s. Winds radiate from its center and gulls fly from its windows. A that is as dynamic as this allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his "

It's either too much or too little to fit and I've ran out of reasons for it even to be either.

Just ran out of reasons.

Sunlit street neighbouring a park

"Have facts really the value that memory gives them? Distant memory only recalls them by giving them a value, a halo, of happiness. But let this value be effaced, and the facts cease to exist. Did they ever exist? Something unreal seeps into the reality of the recollections that are on the borderline between our own personal history and an indefinite pre-history, in the exact place where, after us, the childhood home comes to life after us. ... Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral"

Omission

"[...]" looks so much like devouring, cannibalistic teeth.

Haloperidol

"[...]we are self-consciously aware that our certainty is all hypothetical: we understand that we create the meaning we think we find; we know that when we feel most certain we are taking for fact exactly what we pretend to be. How are these moments of self-consciousness achieved? ...we come to self-consciousness about our pretended certainty through the confrontation with alterity, and experience of the other that surprises us in its intractability, its refusal to conform to what we imagine we know [...] the expectations that we call knowledge."

It's like, you're just blinking and trying to stop the world distorting and swirling and spinning in front of your eyes, but you know it's your head that's that way, and all of a sudden three years have passed. Almost like you're in the same room, same fire burning in the hearth (there's no fire, there's no fireplace) and everyone about you has dissapeared. Your vision's still swimming too. Maybe it's started to sink or drown.



Narcissus leaned closer to the pool,
And in a moment he was gone,
The water surface closing over him as easy as closing a book
Isn't.

The light already grew dark as he sank.
Where is my love? He turns, arms swirling round;
Circling, glancing over his shoulder, hairs lifted and floating
Like some drowned reed.

Methinks this is my love.
He stops looking,
Closing his eyes like the dilated pupil of a lake,
Closed with ice.
His lips part beautifully.
The water surrounds him, pressing against that skin,
So soft, so blue.

Why does my love not embrace me?
He inhales, drinking deep of the Lethian fluid
This must surely be my darling.
He does not open his eyes to see the distorted world around him.
His feet finally sink into the fine sand of the pit of that pool.
Tugged further by the weight of all he doesn't care for,
The rest of his body follows.

Aquatic plants sprout about him, feel about him, coil about him,
Whisper about him.

The First Time I Drowned

A long time ago now, I drowned. I must have been 11 or 12, it was on a holiday in Scandinavia. I want to say it was in Norway, but I don't know. I was with a friend's family, they always took me with them on family events. Parties, trips, walks - all the stuff that never happened at my home, but that's another story.

We were at this skiing place, right next to a forest. There were paths and roads in it during the summer, but here in the winter, the snow veiled it all. There had been a huge blizzard last week, and it kept snowing each day after, so there weren't even any footsteps. Except, of course, for ours. I was with Oscar and Ashley, the two siblings. There was this hybrid between a pond and a lake deep in the place.

It was transformed since we last saw it by a languorous layer of ice. We discovered that if we skipped things over it - branches, stones - that the most eerie and hauntingly beautiful sound was released. It was like the sound had been trapped in the water, in the ice, when it had frozen over, creating that stillness that belongs to lakes, and when we rapped on its surface we were letting it out. Oscar and Ashley were going to get more sticks to throw at it. I tried walking on the ice. It felt completely solid beneath my feet. I made it right up to the centre.

As soon as I was under I was lost. The lake just swallowed me, I didn't even hear the ice crack. I don't even know if I mde a sound. In the time it took to flinch the freezing water had flooded through my clothing. In the time it took to gasp, or scream, it had forced its way down my throat. Everything burnt inside of me. I tried coughing it out and it felt like I was bleeding through my lungs. I thrashed, everything a foggy blur, like the ice had trapped in a huge mist as well as that sound, as well as me.

Somehow I found the surface, but all I could see was ice. It was almost transparent. I could see the cracked blue sky through the frozen water. But it had been cloudy. And it wasn't even sky blue, what I saw above me in that place. It was deeper than the darkest shade of indigo. Almost black. Like dusk after the orange lingering of light has fled, when you turn and look at the furthest point of the eastern sky. It was darker than the water surrounding me. What they tell you about drowning is a lie. Eventually I stopped struggling. But it still hurt, it hurt so much. My limbs wouldn't move, I felt slowness creep up them until they started to sink. I'm sure I was crying but my tears were swallowed up by that ocean too. It was so black that I couldn't tell if I was looking through the ice or down into the abyss of that pool.

When I woke up, my entire body was colder than the snow beneath me. I could barely lift my chest to breathe. No one knew what happened. I was outside again. Out of the pond, lying face up a few meters from the edge. Hours had passed, Oscar and Ashley had ran back to the cabin to tell their parents. The police were the ones who found me. We all assumed some stranger passing through the forest had seen me go under and dragged me out. I don't remember that part. No one was there. All I remember is that coldness, how cold I felt when I woke up. I shivered long into the following night, day, week, long after I stopped feeling the chill. But now I'm cold again. The heater in my room has broken but I don't have time to go to the landlord or whoever and get it fixed. The cold doesn't matter any more, if I leave I'll drown, so I keep reading. I'll go read now.

Prometheus

The brilliance and horror of going to uni at your home town is that you get to see your family often. Currently writing from the glorious wifi of my parents' ^house.

There's this girl in my course. We had a seminar a few weeks ago, on this poem, 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection'. The professor was asking us our thoughts, and I spewed out this concept about the poem following the narrative of the bible. As I blurted it out I realised it was quite good - or rather, maybe it was when they told me after (my coursemates that is). Said it outshone them or something. It's always vaguely uncomfortable receiving that kind of compliment, although it's probably better than being on the other end.

The thing is, this girl is ... there's something off about her. I've grown to dislike her over the course. Odd comments, these glances she directs at me. Suddenly it's like every action she's making is measured to undermine me. She's trying to ruin me. I don't even know how but she is, there's this malice in her eyes. Sure she laughs and chats and all that shit. She gets on with the others too, but that makes it worse, like she's turning them against me too. I don't know how to explain it. I was never particularly good friends with them to begin with, but now it's like she's trying to get them in on whatever her plan is. I'm sure she has one. But I don't know why. It must have started in the first few weeks of this term. She transferred from another course - no idea how she did it but yay for me she fucking did it. I avoid going near her student housing block. I can see a window across from my own room in the private apartments, facing me, another, from the uni-ran block on the other side of the road. Her block. So yeah, it's pretty unavoidable. But that other room opposite, with the curtains always closed. It's hers. Never seen her there (for obvious reasons), but I'm sure of it. Must be. Right opposite me; it's as bad as those charred trees.

I feel sick. Enough about those trees, I can smell the gasoline again. That tangy smell, almost metallic, not a scent really, that sounds too natural, even the word stench does, more like a presence lurking. So I shut my own curtains. See how she likes that. It's like smoke signals - am I thinking of bullfighting? Spaghetti westerns take place in Italy, the filming that is. Cowboys & Indians. So the curtains are billowing in the wind like a matador's cape or a smoke cloud, which gets me thinking again about that fucking gasoline fire, in the night, where you can't see the smoke, you can't see the smoke it's just vanishing above the red and into the ink it's fucking gone without even the sky because of all these clouds. So when I tug the curtains I have to do it in the right way, the right jerks and beats so that she gets my message and knows to fuck off. We got an email off a different professor and guess what, it's on the same poem. I know she's going to use my points, I fucking know she'll steal them for the essay. I point it out but she'll say I know she says that it was accidental or that she forget or that it got into her subconsious because it was so good but how the fuck do I know if  I can believe her?

I think my girlfriend's in on it too. I'm at my ^house which is much closer to hers so I see a lot more of her. Crazy sounding, but she's got her eyes on ^House of Leaves, my second copy, the one with all the notes. Returns day after day asking for it again, not verbally of course, she knows she can't give herself away, but that's what she wants me to do with the book. She asked if she would like it once, since I'm always talking about it, and I didn't know it then but now I'm realising she wasn't wanting to just read it she wants my copy in particular. The one with my notes. All the pencil scratches I've done across it, the pictures and the annotations I've done every night every morning sometimes she's asking, because it's everything I'm saving up for my final dissertation I was always planning to do on it. She's coming over, I see her so often now and I'm sure that's part of her plan, like she made sure I'd be on Christmas break so I'd be in my ^house, and she could come get it from me. She won't. It's under the floorboards now with my other secrets. No way she can fucking have it. I just hope she doesn't hear the floor creak and figure out where I've moved it. It doesn't matter, I'm not answering her calls or texts, and I'll be moving back to my room soon, so she won't have easy access to me or my book, like she does visiting me here putting cough medicine in my tea or whatever to make sure I'm sleepy and docile. I won't be, I never sleep these days. Too much work. There's just not enough time to sleep I don't want another fire, not that it was me I don't think, anyway mainly it's that I'll start my dissertation soon, even though I don't have to think about that for years, I'm doing the planning for it. And then the course is bothering me with all these essays, like the one that girl is gonna take. Another reason to close my curtains, so she doesn't see my codes with a long-range camera or something. Smoke signals have the benefit of blocking out sight even as they try to communicate. And it's funny, the entire thing takes up the entire floor of my room back at the apartments, all the sheets with my thoughts on Danielewski's codes, even Poe's, and the symbolism etc etc etc e She's ringing right now. Can't see the caller name from the other side of the room, but I'm sure it's her I'm sure that's the phone's vibrating. She's been messaging me all day, and texting, and calling, but I am so fucking on to her it's enough to make me laugh, how she feigns worry. Sometimes I think she looks like the girl on my course too, just in her expression I mean. Girlfriend's hair is black like charcoal, the girl on my course is this vomit-yellowbrown rat-shade. But when my girlfriend smiles at me, it's like Her smile, and it unnerves me and I better remember to mention that the reason for her wanting my notes is that she's the girl's accomplice. They say probably that they don't know each other, but they do somehow, either she turned my grilfriend against me or she was against me from the start and she was sent to fucking befriend and hit on and fuck me or something until she could get to the book.

The phone's still tremoring. I don't have a voicemail, so it won't stop. She's still on the other end of the line, tugging it like string to bait me. I don't see the hook but I can certainly feel it when it comes to impale me. I won't answer her. I won't answer her. I'll go back to the apartment and she can fuck off. I'll be allone with the work and the smoke signals. I'm alone.

Everyone knows that memory is like a book you can read and my book is ^House of Leaves, that's where I have all my notes but even more than that, if I lose the book I lose all my memories of it when they start to vanish again like the one on that fire night, unless I was asleep, they'll vanish because the stolen book's full of ink, and memory's always refilling we are people and we have minds because it's always rewriting and in remembering memories of remembering we keep our minds intact as consistent forms and if I lose it the ink still wet is gonna seep off like drops of tears and all that ink is gonna slither off and I'll lose it all, I'll lose my notes on the book and my understanding of it which is just another word for my memory what I am what I can't lose and I can't lose it I don't want to lose it

Page 562

"There is only a black fence
and a wide field and a bar of Wyeth red.

The smell of anger chokes the air.
Ravens of September rain descend.

Some say a mad mad hermit man lived here
talking to himself and the woodchuck.

But he’s gone. No reason. No sense.
He just wandered off one day,
past the onions, past the fence.

Forget the letters. Forget love.

Troy is nothing more than
a black finger of charcoal
frozen in lake ice.

And near where the owl watches,
and the old bear dreams,

the parapet of memory burns to the ground
taking heaven with it."

Another Thing Illuminated

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."

He's just so done.
Like a glass full of sand waiting for the parched man
to thicken his bile into a paste,
dry his arteries and blacken his veins
until withered roots sprawl across his face and
he exhales dust and
grows still on his chair,
petrified stiller than anything living yet still somehow alive.