That year we communicated mostly in light. I was post-break up, living temporarily in a friend’s apartment in a room with no windows, just a skylight. On clear days the skylight cast a rectangle of light high onto the right wall, where it would slide down slowly throughout the day, eventually rippling across the trim like a tapestry before landing flat on the floor at dusk. I sent you pictures of this swatch of light and you sent me pieces of light back. A square of sunlight fixed to the top of a high-rise. Liquid light streaming down from a windowsill. A block of afternoon sun beside a painting on a wall, one like the inverse of the other. That year in a museum I saw a portrait of Yvonne Rainer doing barre exercises underneath a big industrial skylight. I went to hear Anne Carson speak at the library, where she described introverts as akin to “lampish pools of light.” I borrowed a friend’s copy of Anne Truitt’s Daybook, where she said that Proust had said that if he were dying and the sun made a patch of light on the floor, his spirit would rise in happiness. And I texted you several small fragments of light.


✦˖°.

݁₊✦˙ .