Sealed with a kiss. Contents of a flat white box include Isolation, in the extreme, rendered in pencil. I feel the pain and think about the process of perfecting the transference onto paper (so that it passes into me). It would take time, a steady hand, an eye for color or the lack thereof. Self-portraiture. I guess it also requires a mirror. I find them among things I ordered: the envelope, now yellowed and creased, containing several photographs each of my grandmother, my mother, and me. My direct lineage contained in a weakening fold. They've traveled with me across the ocean three times and, now, once alone. I've called them home because I say I have use for them finally. I have lied before about their release, and now I think maybe I have done it again. A cloth came too, the one soiled from polishing the silver bracelet I wear. I requested it specially. Now I sit rubbing in circles, pushing hard to erase the grime accumulated over three months time. Scrapes and gouges I cannot remove. Mine has suffered so much more than his. I'm the one arranging furniture and squeezing through tight spaces in crowded markets. I'm the one moving every two weeks.

I moved. Again, again, again, I am moved.

Grime clings to the windows too. Here, in this new home, it prefers to collect more thickly at the top of the pane. Structured this way, catching the light emanating from street lamps equal with this floor, it looks like rain showering eternally. The lamps are blinding, actually, making my eyes hurt. It burns through the dulled glass, reinterpreting it onto the wall behind me in a giant square sectioned with thin branching filaments of bright yellow, like densely veined tissue magnified for examination. I see myself dark in the image there, a wide head blocking the path of the projector. At first it reminded me of light reflecting off water onto another surface, but that kind is dynamic and unequivocally fluid. This light here, this refraction, it is eerily still. Now it looks like a moment of flame captured forever. I like it. I wish to have delicate, richly veined handmade paper in a fiery yellow. I would hang it on the walls.

I have been experiencing a crisscrossing of signals that makes me think of things far away as if they are here. I think: I will throw this paper away into that trashcan in my room. But oh, that trashcan doesn't exist. I must have seen it somewhere, at someone's house where I may have stayed. Perhaps. No. Wait. It is mine. It's in that place that seems more and more a dream. It's in that same place where there is a man who sometimes bends over a desk, taking a pencil in hand, illustrating instead of writing his sorrow.