who.

Not realizing in fact that the writing was to a question, that the words were out of order and confused that in fact the secret was not something I held but something unknown. That not telling anyone was beyond privilege; a state of lack, a state of indulgence in not knowing. A state in the process of the realization that creativity, originality, or not seeing, blindness on as many levels of grayness, of black and white, of light and dark in the formation of understanding that defies, dismisses, persuades, patronizes, absorption and consumption.

I did not realize that you might describe someone as sick. That I heard those words and heard someone else saying them. I heard those words in a voice all too familiar, in a face I knew too well. In a voice that I could feel lying recently, where lying is not natural and that the prospect of ignorance in the sense of dismissal is much easier than addressing the envelope and sending it, that time exhibits pressures on the moments when it, the crisis, could turn the air a different color, make it weigh more, make the burden less, make it evaporate, make it mute, make it sing. The patience of a notion to keep things indisputably even, that things boil over eventually.

I watched, eked, through the motions and concluded similar conclusions.

In hearing an account, an anecdote, a story, a fable, a dream, a sketch, a moment, of another, I pressed words and asked to ache less. Everything hidden seemed useless as if exposure, revelation, implies empathy, as if clarity, description, understanding, provides these things in themselves. In propaganda, in proposals, in an eternal conversation, dialogue, monologue, some truths and some lies pervade the lines and all of the space, too.

A valise carried unremembered words, unforgettable tone, unspoken, written, etched, scarred. It was the single mention that recalled all of it, opened it, found it and impressed with associations, yearned for more of a lapse, ached for its destruction, that I remembered the pressure and soreness between fingers and in the palm, in its discomfort, in its translation from the letter into a world, a universe.

A stretched hand watches the color fade from areas of the surface, watches the lines of the palm grow darker not in shadow. In tension. The response of the body, of the heart, of the capacity for patience, ill-served, has not revealed itself.