Even if everyone were to appear at the exact same moment, it would still be highly unlikely for it to become equally apparent to all. 

                                                                 MONDAY

            Anywhere around me: that very breath of French glow known only to the mornings after inexplicable ends. IT SMOGGED. — I always had the habit of lowering my gaze to the ground while walking; anything there was in constant flux, the cracks in the pavement / the shadows of passersby, fleeting patterns of time crumbling beneath my feet. Since ever my pupils were drawn to the kaleidoscope of soil and stone and grass, not for more than the parenthetical sake of distraction on an otherwise dull frequency - whatever. I thought they would hear my ideas, so I stayed silent a while; but today I know better. Today, anything could happen, Tolstoy day, I say, today I would write anything like him. Tonight, dream ... dream, I would dance any sequence with him. — Anything is all in a whole, and yet it’s not materialized, not emotionalized - once it would, it eventually disappeared. It’s contradictory; it’s not a thing but also not a nonthing, it won’t be none, neither the sum, even it supposedly should be. Anything can live like that. Any of this things fragmented, not as particle awaiting assembly, nor a void calling for form.  A thing like that doesn’t ask to be seen, and yet it is the condition upon which vision occurs, somehow it’s the little step before; then when the body sets in, the moment the decision is taken to inhale. It’s neither a premise nor a consequence, not an antecedent or conclusion. But it’s there. Even it does not demand existence. Even anything does not contain nothing - it is what allows existence to be thought of. It’s just anything and not everything, however, some things might be still of any kind. Contradiction resists in a definite article, eludes the grasp of enumeration; not anything can be claimed as subject and object without dissolving in the very attempt to articulate; any kind unnecessary, any form predictable - all that  just a thought. Simply, it’s neither this nor that, but the potential for this and that at the same time. Anything does not require meaning, but it makes assumption possible, gives birth to a choice. It is not a name but the very moment when the parents look each other in the eyes. It’s fulfilled. If the pavement is cracked, it is because the surface has never been singular. If the shadow lengthens, it is because light is not a boundary but a field of variance. If anything moves, it does not so as a body within space, but as space itself implementing a universal body,  bounding by syntax / by limit / by necessity. It is not yet presence, but neither is it absence - today anything can happen. Today might be even yesterday; the before of distinction, the quiet state right ahead of articulation. However, let’s not think about that. Tu as froid? —It’s different now. I did let go the looking to the floor, had set myself free, and in this moment I had understood: when you were doing the opposite of starring down and lifted your gaze up while walking / when you turned your eyes instead toward the blue or gray or black; the world slowed down to a point where it was even more gradual than me - all the things aside disappeared; there existed just me and the floating. Once you lifted your head, you swayed with the universe. Maybe you should try it too, in any case, it whipped me like cream. — There was a kind of everything stabilizing this connection between me and the time; while behind me not more left than a trace of gentle swirling / a note of the cosmos just so subtle that any kind felt it in its translucency / a smell, in their lungs and skins, and in their tips and toes, as if it had breathed itself, and unknowingly, I inhaled and exhaled and inhaled all it and all it out and all that in synchronicity. I had been thinking, every bridge needed a plinth; a certain plateau of safety, however, it was climbed, so, whatever. Every thing was done. Everything as the fullness that had no need to expand nor contract, its anagram veils the entirety that doesn’t assemble but always was; it’s the wholeness in which all distinctions arise, the boundless structure that don’t wait for completion because they never been fragmentary. I guess everything had been conscious abut that. While at the same time, it’s been complete. It is the infinite fabric in which every thread is woven, not as separate strands but as the whole cloth itself. And in this, there is no need to perceive, because it’s never ours and it will never be ours, for it is already everything, everywhere, always. It’s the actual sum, a treasure we can all see and feel. Like a king in medieval times. We are not meant to hold it. — I experienced the recognition of my evanescence as the momentary perception of ... peeling ... away from a non-logic dream - I can’t tell how and I can’t tell when, however, it’s been without surprise; without expectations. Maybe it’s how they described it. I found it like the barber who once held the nose in his mouth and was not surprised, or as if I had been the villain who, in dressing the coat, had merely wrapped himself in the fabric the others expected him in. The walls of the room were silent witnesses that revealed unhinged information, the day itself was just in the door / curtains waved from afar like strangers (they didn’t care), a life; a nothing; a ghost wandering through the corridors of memory, touchingly empty, leaving no traces. Every thing has passed. The big all doesn’t gather - rather, it is the precondition for accumulation, the field in which all things stand in relation, the seamless unity that holds without needing to grasp. I didn’t own many things, but I had never asked the other how much they gathered either. — Stepping into society, the air smelled of something. Not of spring; not of summer; not of perfume. But not of emptiness either. I couldn’t describe it; tu as froid?— It breathed by excluding everything, that’s probably it. As if the world had held its momentum to check if it still needed to process; unsure of what to answer. The houses stood like stage sets, their windows blind eyes, their doors exits to silly rounded corners; decorated with the silence of years. It was the same view as from the inside of this exact shape, however, something was different, more different than me changing space. There was no sound, no echo, and yet, some kind felt threaded together in a web of anticipation, waiting for something to occur, but knowing it might never could. There existed so many things that had no purpose to be said. It was in the way the shadows hesitated at the threshold of the light, unsure whether to retreat or to deepen. They wanted to dance. Some things didn’t insist, they merely were, some occasions were actualities, but not in front of the face. Presences with no profiles / a gesture frozen in the air, like a rhetorical question / a heart placed on a table. — I walked through the smell, but it was as if the pavement, too, was suspended, caught in its own riddle. It’s been no repetition. The trees stood still, not because of the wind, but because they had forgotten what it meant to move. It had not repeated. If the only thing left to discover was what remains after everything else has gone unnoticed, something is neither a thing nor a place. Rather it is the space between two moments and as I walked, something lingered, as if it might, at any moment, reveal itself in the simplest / in the way the light falls just so, or how the air changes imperceptibly, with no sound to announce it. Perhaps it was the quiet confidence of time, waiting only for us to recognize its presence. Something, like the pulse / like the stars / like the fuel on the gas station that fed the hypernormalization, lingering in the pauses someone might reflect about the question - the thing is, there were simply none, the wool became dull over all that time went old, now it was imperceivable, just that. — As abstract as anything, left was just nothing, (and to the right a street). Anything in the nothingness is translucent; it felt so good to be naked. I would be too scared to go this way, to the right, however, I guess I did go. Nothing, not a single thing more needed to happen; it had already happened or did so at that very moment, in future they had been taking place elsewhere / in the past they did as well, maybe here and there, maybe without anyone noticing. It’s not up to me to understand it. But as I observed, it had no color, no form, nothing. Monkeys didn’t exist there either, they vanished because I wanted it that way. — Nothing was not a lack, but a synchronicity that contradicted anything within itself and yet being the same empty as there wouldn’t had been materia in first place. And; there had been no materia in first place. All that was not the presence of something, but the absence of everything, leaving no void; no fear, although arising only from a certain kind of fullness / filledness. It was precisely that nothing of which some had once spoken (sure not only I remember it), and yet it was nothing more than an enigma, that never became something but the state that wove existence and nonexistence into a single, dissolving unity. No resistance; no tension; no separation between what is and what is not, what was and what was not and what would be and what wouldn’t be at the same time; at the same second, even the non-being was already part in this nothing, and I, too, was simply there. — But no monkeys. — One might compare it to silence but then I wonder how that sounds - all, while it remains deceptive, even as every definition is erased: Is the nothing the nameless subject that absorbs everything, or is it everything itself, only to obscure it in purest clarity? It’s not important to know. Nothing remains of the try to grasp it, nothing but to accept that it cannot be experienced; its dimension will always exceed the boundaries of fivefold existence and dissolve anew into even more nothing with every attempt to define it. You and me are made to experience.— A man in an oversized coat shuffled past, his shadow a torn piece of newspaper the wind did not carry away; he stole the sun from me. “You’ve forgotten something,” he murmured. What had escaped, he didn’t say. Perhaps it was my name. — The street lay there as it had lain there always, and yet it seemed as though it had risen eventually vertical, as it had grown up from the ground / like a tree. I had forgotten the sky all the years. Instead I knew without looking at the stones they were laid in diagonal rows. I stepped on them as if I were treading on a skin that strained to conceal a long life, I could feel it. However, I needed to walk over them, therefore someone placed it like that, it didn’t matter they had been stones a long time before. — It wasn’t a letter, not a banknote, not anything of significance, only a crumpled fragment that the water of the days before had glued to the ground. The stones of the pavement, no larger than the span of a hand, surrounded it like mute witnesses to a crime no one had committed. I had forgotten about the clouds, but what did I care about the dirt. — I did not bend to pick it up, nor did anyone else stoop to hand it to me of course. So it stayed where it was. I regarded it the way one surveillances crossword things that dissolve the moment one attempt to find. Do you know what I mean? It’s a bad comparison. It regarded me as well, even though I will never be able to find out in which way it perceived me. The simultaneity of things accompanied the situation. Simply because the paper lay there while elsewhere a child was born / a star expired / horses won races. — Nobody comes close to nothing. — I had no need to answer its purpose. All things happened at once, and yet nothing was connected - except by the nothing that permeated all. It’s a reasonable tautology. Everything is right and wrong at the same moment, entangled by its possibility, and further irrelevant in which particular relation once it doesn’t act within our experience. Maybe no one had created us while no one exists / bear with me /or my language. Nothing is separate either, anything just on different frequencies of the same consciousness, experiencing itself in infinite variations, we see 0.0035% of all the light. — It’s dark there, I assume. The universe is not a place, at least not for some flat entities as us; it’s an act of self, where we are it and we are in it at the same time, the a kaleidoscope in a dance, not to create patterns, but to sustain the illusion of separation; observation / surveillance ... joy. The paper was factually me. If I touch, it would stroke me as well, like a device of the mind that sought to break infinity into manageable parts. What I feel myself is merely a vibration in the grass of awareness and what I feel you is the stone; a transient density of information mistaking itself for reality - perhaps in yellow / blue. Maybe spectral. Consciousness itself is no entity, but a process, a current without banks, everybody needed to pay and yet nobody could monopolize it. It’s a principle in motion: each part containing the whole, not as an image, but as essence. The paper was not a moving prisma, but the turning itself. It didn’t matter how close you looked into it, neither if the wind would drag it. — That’s the beauty of the whole, the anything; the ontological structure of being is not a manifestation of substance but a gradient between emergence and dissipation, it must be just like that because nothing distinguishes being and non-being and all this while the babies are born / the men who rode their ponies. As said. It is a mistake to regard being as something that asserts itself stably; an illusion fed by the inertia of perception. It can have eyes, even the house, and yet a door stays somebody that has never experienced love. As soon as the parameters of this perception shift, every certainty slips away, hidden behind curtains, hidden behind pans, hidden behind knifes - unable to cover something. Some have sisters, some have none, but they all had once a mom. That’s we need to know. The self disintegrates into a continuum where differences are no longer anchored in a stable topology but exist only as modulations of waves. — It doesn’t matter if anything or nothing, both had no particular body - and although some of these things have entitative bodies, as well as every something might surround a shape; subjectivity collapses to what appears as solid stage for spacetime, because it’s not more than a falsification (I am faster). For every coordinate system a projection could be made that obscures its own origin. It’s not a circle, because that would be too flat, yet, it might be still surprisingly close. — There were no items on today’s agenda. No  single note in the symphony of nothing. — The houses receded behind me, their views didn’t follow. This life had nothing anymore, which resembles it with something of the things that have been there before. But enough with that. I destructed myself of time, now it had ingrained itself into my skins, there was nothing to do about it. I had stopped hating. In that moment, I no longer even remembered how it felt. Someone told me that drinkers didn’t fear the end of the night but realizing that the glass finished, therefore they stagger back to the counter while it was still half-full / ready to drown / fleeing, not from thirst, but from the pronostalgia of eventual emptiness.—The shore was pretty close but also we walked a bit, right? I first took of my shoes, my socks, I felt the floor - still I didn’t look down - however my feet touched a concrete beach. I took off the  clothes; my watch. I didn’t look down at any point, neither I looked back. Just up. I step into the water and start to swim. — I swam, I swam, I swam. 

                                                               FRIDAY

          I had lost significant seriousity in life, that’s been the first thought. Second was, that the word seriousity doesn’t exist as a term, but I also have been thinking, whatever, it has never been my mother tongue; a swallowed consequence but sometimes unbearable taste.
The morning light filtered through the downstairs, striping the ceiling with shadows that mirrored the flowers on the counter of the gallery, by times I really liked that scenery. I traced the shadows with my toe, said seriousity. Speaking out things that didn’t exist dissolved like sugar on the tongue because it whispered them into being; little like a memento from certain types of men who’d worn beauty like a borrowed suit, I thought about teeth sinking into the knuckle as if it were an apple... 
         “I’m hollowing you out, so you’ll float.” You know what? I didn’t say that loud. I laughed; the numbness had spread like lichen, colonizing the metacarpals, creeping toward the wrist. A dead zone. 
For these moments of confusion while slipping into consciousness I enjoyed owning white bed sheets that reminded me of implicity and order. 
Sheets had to smell of bleach and something fairly floral - lilacs, maybe, or roses ghosts or maybe even the, no ... not the mother; some things needed a certainty, to feel concretion. A moment I buried my face in one of the pillows (all white), inhaling a new reality, at least in my head. Order was a good synopses. 
            I assume it’s the best to start chronologically from the morning.
Implicity is just chaos with better lighting. 
The bed frame, angular, cut into my spine. “Out, out.”
          I thought, some life lectures were irrelevant, therefore maybe the name not rich at all, but understanding the worth of a tidy bed was one of the most important lessons a human could learn, to finish the thought.
         Yes, therefore, for the feeling of importance, I liked it, the curved ceiling, the stairs that led me down every morning to the studio, even though the room itself was a diorama of curated decay: peeling wall, peeling wood; a mirror that reflected only the outline of whoever stood before it, I don’t know where it came from, originally it had been four, the others broke, it didn’t matter: 
All that had to go.
           I needed to take a shower, get dressed. 
          The last summer I slept within two day-night rhythms, but I changed, because since a little while I had an intern; for him I woke up in the morning, did life during the day - discussed in the nights that the new generation impressed me, they were enlighten, what ever that meant.
It was all because I met this artist and that reminded me of the fact I was an artist as well, no matter how unfamiliar it sounded to my own ears, so he got me an intern. It practically fitted my recent lucent decisions; the other artist and me had in common that we both liked pigeons very much and that together we could write endless beautiful letters, addressed to nothing else than the void even though, of course, we didn’t, not at that point.  
Instead, we enjoyed uncommon society.
So we kept speaking, quite a while, and then the junior arrived with the sentence, he carried the death in his pockets - I might have known it.
          There was no death and yet a  brick that locked a frame. A key without a lock. A lock without a door. A door without a window. A window without glass, a glass without a frame... the web could be knit endless. 
It had a beauty that the intern arrived with this certain boldness of vocabulary, reminding me of anagrammatic safari, a type of sonic occasion containing masochism, (pardon), a taste, I enjoyed the most. 
I stood in the shower thinking about the paradigms and the creation of them; if a funeral could be fun; about the fact, that some days felt perfect for a ballade. 
             Recently I had realized that I liked tension, but only in social dynamics. 
My shower was in the middle of the studio. I exited and saw that the space was flooded, I stopped a moment to regard the fiasco, imagining tiny ships carrying even more tiny survivors. It pissed me off. I wished them to sink; they did. 
I looked at the clock and rolled naked a cigarette. As I smoked, I let the water dance over my feet, my toes played with it. 
After I dried the floor, I smoked another one.
         The intern didn’t like it when it smelled like cigarettes, assumingly I needed to respect that and therefore I quit when he arrived; I kept my promise, while now I guess, in this moment, I did it hidden. 
He arrived daily fifteen minutes early, the smell was still hanging in the walls; it was his creature of habit to recognize things uncommented; or maybe it’s been his compulsion, however, also that I had to accept, but I was far away of liking it.
The intern had a strange appearance, with prominent lips and white hair like copper wires, his look I could accept better, it showed interest in a certain form of reality; his eyes were the color of wet asphalt, when we went outside people looked. 
Today, he wore a trench coat two sizes too large, sleeves swallowing his hands. “You’re late,” he’d say; I wasn’t of course. We could have created a script to numbness of this conversation, so far I didn’t ask why he said it.
            As described, a strange identity / discrepancy.
Made me think facts: however an entity was supposed to be defined as, dressed up or with big lips, identities needed seriousness.
Whether you’re a peacock or not. (The young boy wasn’t a peacock, but I was.)
Seriousness was the glue of a persona. 
Without a hold, it’s just a costume hung on air, but once inhabiting it feathers a contract there wouldn’t be more fitting words than:
             I am this brilliance; worship me. 
It could be like that, it should be like that!, but, tuck the feathers, and what’s left? 
A bird that shrieks like a broken violin. 
I envied its certainty. 
            Even dead, it knew its role. 
Made me think further; it’s all made up, it’s ridiculous that we have this vocabulary to describe a street. 
This sounds like I had been aware at that moment, but no, no, I wasn’t; instead it was all really… normal. A normal state of entropy; also from last night / last week. The slow unraveling of order into a yawn of particles. 
The space reflected this state. I mirrored it like the walls; no canvases leaned against them, no half-painted faces melting into abstraction (as they all do), it’s what you expect of a concept, I had been assuming. 
         However, a sculpture of wire and teeth and three pairs of air pods gathered dust in the corner. The air smelled of turpentine (not because it was needed, but because it was wanted) and rotting peaches. The artist was here, when the intern asked, “Is this intentional?” Is anything? But this was not today.
         As I identified myself, there were always things I pushed into the future (always), while I knew exactly they wouldn’t disappear anywhere; it would be dare to call this behavior a certain way of care work, the fetishization of futures that will never arrive, executing consciously the blinded masochism in it, the disease of the chronically self-awareness, however, sometimes things came all together.
For years, I’d curated a mental archive of later — letters unsent, apologies unmade, a feuillton titled how to vanish, gracefully written under my nails (it started to itch); it’s been no fiction, but no prophecy either, however at some point the future was a nice place to limbo. But now there is a construction site in front of my house and recently I said that it will not disappear within my lifetime. 
We closed the doors after the words went outside, but also this not today. Today we listened to John Oswald, because it was unfamiliar to the junior. I might have stole a sentence about  definition and repetition, whatever. 
He didn’t really listen, so already after some minutes he asked: “Today’s agenda?” though we both knew there wasn’t one. “Petrification,” I said. He stood up (what annoyed me, because it interrupted the sound), went to his laptop; typed PETRIFACTION. 
           It stayed uncommented.
       After I finished tiring him we sat outside in the sun and discussed traditions, not caring about any noise, but also it was just back and forth.
I heard the first time of Ghana go Home bags, learned in return the story of a gay Neo-Nazi that married an African woman / led a party in a country in which she didn’t even live. “In Nigeria, when you’re expelled from a community, they give you a case; a bundle of your belongings, saying goodbye with plastic. They don’t want to see you again.”
Pathetic.
         Someone recently said, it’s the time to leave Europe, but where nobody could answer. 
We talked a moment about it before we installed between us a silent pendulum, hung like Lebanon dancing. Whatever it was that made him uncanny, he spooked me out because I didn’t know where he belonged to holistically. But it’s been already quite a time like that.
We were born on the same day, him ten years later.
He wanted to show me something.
            The cinema area was a cardboard proscenium glued to the studio’s east wall; for my personal taste it was enough to project things on uncertain surfaces (I preferred curved corners with ceilings), but I assumed that there was a new wave of work which needed to happen ... more accurate and since it didn’t bother me — and I had recently a good amount of time — I let him craft whatever he wanted; we celebrated a leaving, even he was not invited to this detail so far. 
He unspooled a film. 
“This one’s about a man who forgets his name,” he said. “How original.”  
We watched in silence. Someone peeled off his skin, layer by layer, until he was a skeleton in a tuxedo. Too on-the-nose. The film was a 1920s German silent film. Fraud. Coward. Ghost. Ohhh. In the final scene, he danced with his skeleton in a ballroom of mirrors, something like that. In reality a seagull landed on the garden side, eying a shoe. “Where?” the intern asked. I gestured to the door. “Anywhere.” He typed: EXIT STRATEGY: TBD. 
The “E” key’s absence gaped like a missing tooth, it had eaten my nerves to a certain point. He typed down everything, he appeared like somebody I knew. 
It was a medium good behavior. 
          He showed me the collection of movies that were supposed to be used for a collage he worked on.
I had organized the projector — a 1960s Bell & Howell — a little while ago, it was whirred like a dying insect. Well, I indicated it as funny times for somebody that didn’t watch movies. It’s been a curated program: Ecdysis, The Bite (a French New Wave film about a man who eats his own passport), and Autolysis (a 10-minute loop of a mushroom decaying).
We sat on milk crates. 
I got handed popcorn seasoned with paprika, salt. He surprised me sometimes.
Some of the sequences I enjoyed, about the rest I didn’t say much, because I knew too little about cinematography.
“Ecdysis,” he said, “means shedding skin.” I nodded. Whatever, right? The film flickered. Klaus peeled his epidermis like wallpaper. The intern scribbled: SKIN AS TEXT. I ate a kernel. A moment I felt myself a poet, but I said nothing.
Since he was here, we crafted a pattern of what we could find and I did good in pretending to be an artist simply because otherwise the intern would have been useless; for now it worked well, it gave a frame to both of us, nobody questioned the process and by this afternoon it would be already over.
The routine: a séance without auras (but I guess it came because he identified himself quite spiritual). We dissected films, drank over-steeped tea, and pretended the studio wasn’t dissolving around. “Is the peacock Ada?” “Is entropy art?” I deflected. He typed: REALITY: TBD. 
          The last thing we did that day was playing opulent society / whatever that means / with crystal hats and golden shoes, I demanded it, and it has been fun, at least for myself.
          The crystal hats — salvaged from a bankrupt theater (I went on a date to get them) — refracted light into lies, at least that was what I told him. The golden shoes pinched. I wanted the intern to get into the red curtain, to pretend being the duke of evanescence, but he was too shy, I assumed it was due to his age. 
I told him who wants to do an experimental film needs to do experiments, but according to his puberty, he didn’t want to. A spider feels a web also on the other end, more I couldn’t do, so what did I even speak about.
Instead I waltzed to a record skipping and shifting a deformed version of maritime rites, originally a vinyl of 1984; I had put it into the ocean, waited for salt and dirt to dry on it. 
It was nice what the sea did to the audio.
Aware that I held a certain amount of power in this play, I ended the theater with the sentence: “It’s one big shit show.” The intern nodded, said thank you very much for this time, goodbye. 
        He left a little after two, weaving through the construction site with an umbrella borrowed from a ghost, no; not a ghost of course, but somebody that didn’t come here anymore. I counted the cracks in the ceiling, twenty-one now. 
The studio exhaled, a mechanical gasp. 
Time, it seemed, had decided to participate. The air thickened with the scent of turpentine and the metallic whisper of the sun. I pressed my finger against the door, why ever, the glass fogged, then crystallized into fractal patterns / Petrification. 
Outside, the cranes danced a deranged ballet. 
The mixer churned a slurry of concrete and cigarette butts. 
A worker in an orange vest hurled a brick. 
           It missed. 
The world missed everything these days, but thats just how we all feel the normalization, it wasn’t a reason to be hopeless. 
I thought about the bed sheets, I should install them everywhere, as protection / art and art and art and absence side by side.
The day they brought the intern, he’d arrived with a mason jar of teeth. “For the film,” he’d said. I’d laughed. “Whose?” He shrugged. “The dentist’s dumpster.” I thought about it when I weaved goodbye. Because, whatever.
        Now, the jar sat outside next to the barbie, molars glinting like ivory dice. I unscrewed the lid. If I would know how formaldehyde smells I would have claimed it scented like that. Some fingers hovered. “Don’t.” I plunged it in. The teeth nipped. The numbness retreated, briefly. A truce but what do I know. I waited for silence, to clean the echo from the happenings last night, they made me feel powerful / dirty, so I decided to not liberate the vocabulary and yet I put on music. No unscrewing.
It had nothing to do with the junior. But sometimes the need for silence was still unreachable. Maybe because a man in a fox mask had pressed a vial of powder into my palm. “Euphoria,” he’d said. “Euphemism,” maybe; it was just a second before the did his favorite monologue naked in front of me, I gave myself a go, and as said, now I waited for the judge. He, I guess, died in the purgatory. 
It’s been somebody I didn’t know how to think of. In that night I asked if the powder tasted of battery acid and childhood, then I asked his name. Of course it provoked.
              Now, silence was a myth. 
The studio hummed with tinnitus and the distant wail of a car alarm, I was still not used to the American way of sirens. I queued Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony and put a gramophone filter (on the desktop), with the extra of a missing needle, I felt it was purposed, at least to my likings. For now. 
The disk spun, silent, but only digital; it did what it was supposed to. “Perfect.” The doll didn’t nod. Not this time. I danced myself into that state — a jerky marionette waltz, arms akimbo, slippers slapping concrete, but it was so pleasant. Oh so pleasant. The numbness slithered up my arm, a serpent with no agenda but consumption. J’ai froid. 
I’m vanishing; ash tastes like endings, but all that just hollow words. “I won’t say them.”
A note was written on the back of the lost cat flyer. 
ERWIN, it pleaded. LAST SEEN: NOWHERE. It sat on the chair, refracting the studio’s chaos into prismatic lies, it’s been sweet how all the things ended up here and nowhere else. 
         I had curated myself to that point, finally and finite, someone would say, how do poets write so many poems, I really don’t know Nikki but it happened without big tension, not even with a lot of recognition while also not with a lot of fear, however, from that knowledge now I could choose how to corrugate. 
I knew it’s been time to fold into ridges / to become a landscape / to erode. I stripped to my underthings — yellowed cotton, frayed at the seams. The mirror reflected only my outline. “Who?” it asked. “No one,” I said. I pressed my palms to the studio wall. The plaster sighed. I pushed. The wall bent, corrugating into ridges — a topographic map of nowhere. 

HOW TO DISAPPEAR. 

     Step 1:  Remove your name. 

     Step 2:  Become a rumor. 

     Step 3:  Forget the difference. 

I had seen it, I had internalized it. I started to experience it, and it felt fresh. J’ai froid.
The pattern fingerprinting. What I wondered was, is it mine? I painted it on the floor in turpentine. A spiral, a noose (hemp rope from the construction site). A fingerprint (the one of someone, inked with the jar). 
The studio door was open. 
           The clock struck 3:47. 
           As a lie or a suggestion, today I didn’t feel that stiff about it.
Jewelry sounded like hesitation of fluxus to me, so I decided against; didn’t put some, didn’t even think about it. The shoes with sound I didn’t choose either, all should happen in tranquility — that’s how it was supposed to be I guess.      
No matter that Dolly was already born, she shouldn’t see any of this.
I had no box for jewelery, instead I kept it in a cigarette bag, however, it only contained four rings of a dead lady, a necklace with an olive, the Turkish eye, a coin of Kennedy.
I snapped the lid shut. “Tranquility,” I recited. “Tranquility.” The word tasted of freezer burn. Have you ever heard fabric crack?
The outline in the glass saluted, but all this was diabolic, oh so diabolic. 
I had thought about putting the coat, but then I heard my grandmother talk about a squirrel still being a rat, no matter what fur they dressed, so I picked the uniform instead, the symbol of petrification, I had been thinking, it’s fine, just one last time. 
It didn’t freak me out once I understood it started, because I dreamt so, in my visions it came along exactly like this all time and all day and all night; it relieved me that I had decided as it was decided and it tickled me when I tickled the pattern.
It was the end of a time spent in stasis (even I enjoyed it), with a mind stained of inertia, it was needed, but more urgently it needed to end.
             Well the next thing was; I sat on a bench.
         I’d sat here two years ago, when the trees leaned in. The park was a diagram of municipal order. Symmetrical flower beds (Gerbera, cloned). Symmetrical pavement (cracks measured, filled). Symmetrical trash cans (emptied nightly). Only the bench untilted, a tooth knocked loose. I traced its iron bolts. 
Cold. Always cold. They were all things perfectly alighted along a micro street park with tall trees / also the same floor as everywhere; the same bushes as everywhere; it’s been everything for a while now, architecture from the last century to impress, however, it did it’s magic also to me, so I couldn’t say something against. There, the city felt large.
A child’s glove lay abandoned. Pink, sequined. I pocketed it. It was an evidence. The numbness reached my shoulder. J’ai froid.
The houses loomed — a geometry of glass and pretense. The only tall buildings of the city mirrored each other like an infinite regress. 
             A woman in a fur coat walked a hairless dog.
They both shivered. I unbuttoned the uniform. It pleased me to remember, while there were no leaves left but a notion of spring asking me to eat the grass. You understand?
A human narrative doesn’t contain much, this stayed with me seated for a while / a human narrative is rare; a narrative of a human even rarer. 
They were what they worked and did, they were where they lived and ate and they obeyed whom they were dammed to love. For some it’s been warmer all through than for others, I assumed, but it didn’t matter. 
             While I sat there I smelled something, so I turned my head, but there was nothing. 
This kind of phantasmagoria happened often to me, I had nothing against, it fitted perfectly my liking of pain, I wasn’t extremistic with it, yet, sometimes I registered myself in a course of swirling and I had become an expert in memory deformation. 
I have never thought that dying looked like this.
                The woman glared.
            So I got up the bench, looked one more time around to be sure but only saw a group of tourist passing / a man waiting for the streetlight to change / a children telling the mother a story. I walked. It was good that things happened in synchronicity, I spoke it later out loud, it didn’t change anything even it was the truth. 
I entered the building of the advocate and they had the door already open, it was like I floated into the entrance hall and there everything already had been perfectly prepared, everything waited; I arrived to the exact minute, I knew it, because I could hear a church bell ring.
              We said friendly hello, they handed me a water and all it didn’t take long; actually it took exact this amount of time as I had imagined it — we signed, have been shaking hands (a bit too long though) / they asked where I would move and I felt free enough to answer that I had not thought about this yet, but that I would leave maybe even sooner. The confidence I borrowed from the uniform; it crossed my mind  in a later moment. 
We agreed on whatever, probably a good life or something like that, said goodbye. I took a last sip of water, exited the door and called the number I needed to call; it felt logic. 
I waited until the street light shifted, and I waited until the person picked up; the sun was shining; where I am from we would call it hairdryer wind time of the year.
She reached her phone, we had a short conversation and it was just throwing it out, it should show that I had survived, that Barbara wouldn’t be a further part in life, that only the documents were left. 
             I was released, and she said something like let’s see each other later, and there was a later, there was a green street light, so I quit and I pass. 
             It reached me, but not in a direct way; it happened more frequently, especially due to the appearance of Dolly Blockbuster, that people interrogated her without her consent, but so I had been become deaf when she walked, it yet surprised me that my mind tricked me around the pattern of memorization, however / whatever. 
Only because I heard the uniform name I stopped walking; only because an offense reached my ears, a question, something that required response. 
When I turned around the erection of the moment fell off me, as it had never existed, (it’s hard to describe), but in this moment I had thought that my mind wanted to protect me of something, but the external world wanted me to be scarified. 
I am a regular victim of social conventions, so I said with a silent tonation that I was happy it’s been that human and no other. And I was. I guess. 
            The keys kissed in my palm. A spark. A hiss. 
The world dimmed. 
            He found me at the bone-yard fountain — our old collaborative wound. The plaza’s cobblestones still bore the grooves of some Lullaby’s clockwork rats, their tiny teeth fossilized in municipal concrete. 
It was nearly like the third pillar smoked a cigarette rolled from ledger pages, the ember flaring each time he inhaled a lie, it didn’t matter. But I wanted that cigarette. He asked, if I would like to have a coffee. I excused myself, saying I needed to sent this things that had something to do with my old profession, and indeed I needed to as also said on the telephone, but he invited himself, jumping to the statement that recently he felt actually really good, so he wondered, why we spoke. 
I walked and rested within the theater. I didn’t say something, because it was ridiculous, a scattered epiphany kind of thing. He waited outside the post office, then it took too long, so he entered. I decided to send the things later, the children wined.
We left towards a coffee shop.
His optic was a clinical, but to stand near him was to feel the air thin, as if his aesthetics existed only to offset the vacuum within. 
We were sitting quite a while in front of each other and it had no purpose, while it was only there to pass. 
          I had this paper in my bag, but it didn’t had something to do with it. It wasn’t a revelation. Not a thunderclap or a siren. Just a quiet settling, like dust motes in cathedral light. 
A man came, asked for the way, he must have thought we were a unit. 
The café’s mirrors had shattered, but the shards still reflected — fractured, recursive, infinite. In my head there spoke three narrators, and one had no control over what was happening, while the others embraced the fading.It had to happen; and this was it. 
The numbness had spread — lichen on metacarpals, frost on the femur; but now it felt less like erosion and more like petrification. A hardening. A crystallization.
               Third Pillar’s beauty theorem, yes, (yes), but so was his emptiness. 
All words were equations solving for zero and yet a lovely echo, I had heard it, because also towards myself I did poetry. At that table I was the variable. 
With no arguments there I did poems.
I had ordered espressos for us; I smoked endless cigarettes of his (thinking, it stops when all stops), promising myself it wouldn’t make me start again, it was the difference of the day, I was aware of it. 
The city had petrified. 
The fountain next to us — a dry basin strung with caution tape — twitched like a nerve. We’d engineered it to weep rust on the mayor’s birthday. Now, it was just another civic corpse. 
                Not a gem, but the hollow where longing had ossified. 
The understanding that every lie, every curated echo, every fraternity cuff link, had been brushstrokes on a canvas stretched across my ribs. It had arrived, the moment pronostalgia died, grieving was now possible; I realized it contained all subjects, but then I wondered why I was experiencing it. Not just the numbness, also the seriousness. Where I live; what I eat. 
The fetishized future collapsed into now; real nostalgia (the fossilized past) became never. 
He’d always been a curator of erasures, our being was a shared excision: peeling back the epidermis of meaning to reveal the abscess beneath.
“You’re auditing your autopsy,” he observed.
“And you’re still stitching cadavers.” (We both didn’t say any of this things.)
The keys kissed again.
But I wouldn’t see the outcome, because logic would take my breath away.
Another hiss; the world dimmed.
The key throbbed. I pressed it to my wrist, felt its teeth graze the radial artery. 
Tick. Tick. Tick. I left, goodbye, without weaving.
When I was around the corner, I called again the number. When she picked up, I had been speaking so fast, that we were done within three minutes. We were supposed to see in a second anyways, but then she didn’t show up. I got rid of the documents, the second plinth, and then:
                Forward. I walked. 
I walked because the night was already written, the streetlights a lit path in an unfinished manuscript. The air shifted; I shifted. And yet there was no time to think. Fabric, gesture, gait—everything obeyed a logic already composed. This wasn’t the costume; this was the role. 
                The glass door of the gallery breathed me in, but I didn’t go, I didn’t go...
If I could have decided the evening, it would have been a theater of decay with the silence of Cage. With taxidermied peacocks hanging from the rafters, their iridescent trains brushing the powdered wigs of municipal judges below. The air reeked of named formaldehyde and ambition. 
It could have been a choice towards sarcasm, but then I thought its not worth nothing.
Inside, the cycle was a ridiculous theater. Pale wine, slow circles of conversation that never ended, only reconfigured. The same faces, same voices, same laughter in lacquered repetition. A painter whispering, “They’re really taking risks with light.” A critic nodding, hands clasped as if in prayer. But today it was my funeral, so I didn’t bother.
Nothing changed, everything performed itself, flawlessly. The artist was there, but where else he would be. 
I watched. Watched how the language folded onto itself — statements curling into questions dissolving into statements. I am not sure if they knew first or me.
Nobody ever spoke directly, and yet everything was exposed; in that performance, a presence. 
                A sharp, deliberate geometry — black hair razor-cut, a red fur coat draped like a pronouncement, gloves that belonged to another century. 
Not old, not young. 
She stood like a punctuation mark in the gallery’s haze, a woman who had always known how to take up space.
She did not arrive; she appeared. And I think she came to drag me.
                  Her sentences were weighted pauses, a tilt of her chin was a stage direction.
She was the kind of person who could recite an anecdote sounding prophetical / the kind of person who would never let you forget that she was watching you observing. As she presented herself it must have been her.
We fell into step — me, the artist, and her, walking out into the street. We all turned voyeurs to see what the funeral was ending like, but we didn’t care. The others because they didn’t know. But neither did I.
The air had the shimmer of a moment that knew itself.
Things were matching perfectly, each step landing like it had already been taken. She called herself many names, and because I wouldn’t memorize anyways, she lifted a cigarette to her lips without lighting it, holding the pause like a final act.
“It’s all timing, isn’t it?” she said.
I exhaled. Yes. Yes, it was.
                  “You’re late,” she hissed, adjusting her epaulets of molted feathers. Not open. Not shut. Ajar. She spoke, and it was theater. Not performance, but monologue — or rather a dialogue with its own internal rhythm, perfectly paced for invisible cues. Even her silences were structured, a choreography of withheld reaction, I had deserved it like that and it filled me. She had a way of looking at people that made them edit themselves mid-sentence, rephrasing to match a script they were unaware of. It was inevitable that we would leave together. The place had arranged itself accordingly, the sound her cadence of the footsteps against stone, she followed, but not explicitly. 
She moved because she knew where to lead me, the protagonist drifted beside her, half-participant, half-observer, feeling the night tighten around the grim like the final stitches in a seam. It didn’t matter. 
Everything was happening exactly as it should, it had always been intended to lead to this moment, as if they had all been nudged, without their consent, to fulfill something inevitable. There was no need to be sad.
I exhaled, watching the breath dissolve into the cold air, a perfect scene, held in delicate balance.
It happened like a trick of light — love, or something masquerading as it — slid between the grim and the protagonist / me and her / imperceptible at first, like a change in air pressure before a storm. A current neither invited nor resisted. It joined, it laced, it rearranged the sequence of gestures until all movement belonged to the same composition. Without knowing why, without needing to know, the protagonist leaned into it.
They drank.
They danced.
                   I did similar. 
Someone said, it’s time to leave the country, but I barely remember. I wouldn’t make it to the next day anyways, this is what I was thinking.
Not as performed joy, but as steps into an instinct long buried — a body remembering it had once been fluent in something other than silence. The room pulsed with it, the wine deepening shadows, distorting time. There was no moment of decision, no deliberate descent; it was simply what followed, as if the night had always intended to fold into this rhythm. A circling, a closing, a ritual they did not know they had been waiting to perform.
Someone laughed, sharp and sudden, and the sound broke open the evening like a seam giving way. I had them all banned from my thoughts, because the devil was inviting me.
                    I was a sheep.
Oh what a thing, not even Normal could survive it, I had been thinking. But maybe he did.
A dance, but a procession; an old profession; a glass (many glasses), a kiss to a stranger. 
We did it with or without knowing and we played actors as well as it was given to us / the artist, the other and me. It was all absurd and precise, the exact amount (3) to start chaos, a these written in fever-dreaming. In that dance I dissolved into the movement, the heat, the weightlessness of something ending but not yet just started to end. 
They will be paper one day.
It was not much time between that and later. 
A candle guttered on the table. 
                        She will wear also that day gloves, a scene preparing for its blackout.
They did not notice. None of them did. That was the point.        
So I said goodnight.
And because it’s senseless, I don’t remember going home. In one moment, at least, it was like that, I just was. The horse was already waiting. And that was the moment when everything stopped — not the beginning of nothing but an infinite amount of anythings, all condensed into a single split second where time bent, or rather, where it folded into itself, an impossible crease in the fabric of now, so I asked the horse to lay down, rested my body against its wrist. It huffed. I looked at it, so still it was placed next to me. There was no sound of things, no movement — just the sudden presence of light. 
The shadow has been there before the light from the edges of reality but I wouldn’t think anymore. It didn’t matter. I could feel the weight of it, the pressure of everything falling away at once, crushing me, suffocating me.
                     I took a step forward. 
                     Just one.
I mounted it, slowly, my hands trembling but steady. It felt real, more real than anything had ever felt, so I grabbed the horse and I ran. Just before it all slipped away, there was nothing anymore.
                     Polar bears never need to cry.