Remember the letters, with your scholarly manners of speech and good diction, fast and dry. Tell me something Althusserian about how I never returned the favor, never sent a book about escape and freedom to match the one you sent me, though I carried an address in my back pocket.

But that’s only performance, saying so. Performance plain and tangled, restricted by the extant, by dithering realist mirages requiring empirical backdrops for their spellbinding like standing nude before a window pretending to be lost in thoughts other than the kind that wish someone would actually see actual actuality, staring out at nothing, scanning for scopophilic eyes with equal parts fear and reflection, knowing they’d see right through if they got in behind the glass and the whole thing would come tumbling down.

Each day is a good day for a walk in the open, and with a camera anyone could be like Ellison in Harlem or Cartier-Bresson in Prague or Capa in Spain, registering a new idiom, wondering what we see will say and make us. The give and take, out of the stream, watching for anything but answers from behind the waterfall, just watching, a cage seeking a bird till it’s all a dream, till everyone looks the same, vaguely thinking there’s always something to be said for those out there in love with who we want to be.

Originally published earlier today on Hijacked Amygdala.