PS. The keyboard’s coated with slow-acting, contact poison. You’ll be dead in an hour.
PPS. Just kidding! Or … am I?
PPPS. I’m just screwing with you. But postscripts sure are fun!

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s “This Is How You Lose the Time War”

“How do you spell ‘love’?” – Piglet
“You don’t spell it…you feel it.” – Pooh”

A.A. Milne

Journal from 20X6, September [X]

Subject: Why I can’t bring myself to … or, even footnote about email.

Every letter not sent, is a letter lost, you think?

[but] Isn’t it funny, how missing something that’s easy to despise pangs given time—maybe some last place we would find our filters truly broke: tears, splits, drips, fullspill, overflow—the prodding, q’s, waitless, weightless, stillness, endless refresh.

I would agonise, scribble, think—obviously circling—it’s clearly an irredeemable motif, impossible to shake, quench or [it’s the endless, repetitive charm, of conjuring something from nothing and doing so, over and over again]. Nothing to say? Start writing again, again. It’s the point of refrain.

So here we are, and here we are, again, again.

Email have, are, is, has become toxic waste … which is a shame.

I would write in circles around the edges, remember one thing trying to remember others, [back to our] rooms, hours, hope … starting in one place, building on others—obsession after obsession after obsession.  

You just know it’ll [you’ll find it] be in the notes.

[but] Words sometimes don’t work. They either feel unreachable, invisible; impossible to keep still—they really need that one place at one time to make seeing it settle, just so (it’s a think, my love—as you know); just to imagine, in even the simplest order. It breaks you, makes it harder to make you take you anywhere I want to—and that’s the trick, the only reason—those flights, and walks, where water, strange alleyways, canopies … grow?

I promised letters, words, emails—it only worked for a while. But then one pen, that cotton parchment paper that felt like paper ought to feel, the pencil that should’ve feel[t] uncommon between fingertips, found welds, an angle light enough to start uncovering the sounds that help[ed] make words visible [for you] again.

Or what’s more? What is more, exactly … it’s got to be a little knackered at its fringe, a little tired of upping and oofing and rowing (as in, not wet), because, if every letter not sent, is a letter lost, is a thing, it’s always a more that’s to blame—it’s never enough, I know it’s never enough, I don’t want there to be enough, but what if it is just enough—so, we desperately reach for more letters and rooms (for more memories (for more words (to write, and write more letters))).

Nothing is ever lost … but we are sometimes found … again and again and again, again.

—JustD

Francis Bacon, self portrait