section 1
I do not know how to write like I used to. When it made sense, my thoughts were clear and my language sprung from the page. Now, I swear, it feels as if the letters are literally disappearing in front of me. I tried to take a pen to paper / tried to type into this machine. Letters do not stay in front of me long enough for me to read them. My thoughts dissolve as the alphabet becomes ephemera. What used to be my world, my work, is gone.
Now, wherever I look, it pales. The horizon dissolves like a mirage before me. I have lost the place where I stood. It seems, I am drifting into absence. This hurts and it feels like every breath I take gets shallower, as if it never belonged to me.
My life and routine was how it worked. The singing birds with the dawn would encompass my bedroom, leading me to my work table to write. This routine was the cage that I willingly kept. I would sweep the corners and open the windows to congregate with the day. The work was from dawn to noon.
section 2
This was how days began for the writer. She wrote. Like breathing, her world was sitting at her work table. It never occurred to her how this could ever be taken, yet it was. Unclear at first, billboards throughout the day would be off. Not spelled correctly, letters missing, letters disfigured. Buy now, now said B y o. It did not seem like these small events would merit too much thought, to her it just seemed like a technical issue. Typographical errors and absent mindedness to fault. Things that can be overlooked, corrected & ignored. This gradual degradation initially was easy to live with, you fill in the blanks like a game of hangman. But these small events began to feel ever present.
section 3
After work, I’d read the obituaries in the news, the accomplished dead filled my afternoons. That day, to me, the letters withered gestalt. Beyond a mere letter missing. Letters ineligibility clumped to each other, unsorted, refugees spaced oddly in a city imploded. swathes of space would litter what used to be paragraphs. Stories, carpet bombed into submission. Decades of experiences omitted. Folios clung to the edges of the page, indifferent. If my indifference bridged me to the world, now it collapsed. I could no longer ignore what was staring back at me. I pulled the paper to me as if to save what remained, my hug would protect what lingered knowing that it was too late.
I bolted upright from where I read. Stumbling over the news, I staggered to my work table. Frenzied, I shifted through my manuscripts. this viral consumption, patches of letters unhinged aimlessly throughout the page. Letters scrambled over the page. Jumbled, my notes were disorder.
section 4
Deflated, I settled into my chair, slowed my breath and began to think. This was when I remembered a story of a dead calligrapher, Eunice Aphroditus. In the obituary he described letters as apotropaic charms. The letters were the juju that held us together. Letters ward us of a universal chaos. Dead romans chiseled into stone the same letters we warehouse with servers. Now, exposed to ravages, witness Kali’s lolling tongue shamelessly whipped an endless finality.
WIP May 2025