 Have I forgotten how to write? I've forgotten how to write. That night, when the thought occurred to me to write, I wanted to write something entirely different from what I wrote. As I sat at the kitchen table sipping on the holy basil tea, I thought about all the people I have known, people lost to time and space, people falling in and out of relation, the inscrutability of it all. Lily called that morning. A college friend she had not spoken to in ten years had just died of AIDS-related complications. That morning, she started to write an essay called The Geography of Friendship, an essay about distance and estrangement. She couldn't get over the fact that this person she had known so well fell out of her life completely and now does not exist on this planet at all. Who was the person who died and who was the person she knew? I have sometimes thought about this when thinking about the brother I knew before prison and the brother I cannot know now because I'm not privy to his universe because we live in two different worlds. The world of the free and the world of the unfree, me on the side of the free but bound to the world of the unfree by a blood relation. What does it mean to grow apart, to evolve on separate islands into the creatures you become mostly by happenstance, the finch or the bird of paradise? On the phone, Lily and I congratulated ourselves for staying friends across the distance. I assured her that it is possible to remain in relation though the quality of the relation is sometimes altered when you try to resink after being apart for years. When I wanted to write that morning, I was thinking about an essay I wrote a few years ago about traveling to Budapest to visit Mattias, a Hungarian man who had been my best friend while I lived in Quimming, China. I probably would have forgotten this piece of writing completely had Dodie Bellamy not spoken of it glowingly. Though the piece of writing is only a skeletal description of a neutral encounter, the piece has remained dear to me perhaps because in writing it I learned two very important lessons, that human connection is all about timing and that staying in relation is all about rhythm, remaining in sync or becoming synchronized, inhabiting a similar tempo or being near each other when your daily tempos get thrown off beat and you suddenly find yourself experiencing each other through that rupture. Through the cuts in your lives, swerve with me, observe who comes into your life during those moments you lose control, observe what happens to the texture of your writing, the moment you are without a dressy. Do you even write at all? I opened this piece with the question, have I forgotten how to write? Perhaps I have forgotten how to write you, to say anything to another or to conjure the object of memory by tricking it into presence. You, the self understood through a linguistic relation because there is only relation and no self, only the third body created between entities. I thought about the loss of the you and the structure of apostrophe as I thought about a letter my best friend Matthew sent me for my birthday. When we lived together, we would go to a local gay bar and write letters to people on our DIY stationery. We were compulsive in our desire to connect, always dropping our whimsical musings into everyone's mailboxes, getting all twisted up inside over abstract crushes we had probably idealized. Matthew's letters are always nostalgic. No matter where he's at, he starts from the place of loss, from the belief that his life once contained a magic that is now irrecoverable. In this letter, he reflects on the domestic traditions that were developed by the new college queers as they were caring for a dying friend. One of these traditions was using the joy of cooking as a kind of Bible. Cooking was practiced as a form of care, as queer homemaking. In the letter I wrote to Matthew, I also mourned the loss of socialities that revolve around the sharing of food. I wrote, I no longer have anyone to cook for. What feels better than cooking for friends? Almost nothing. It's terrible to have no one to cook for. Writing to Matthew made me think about the last time I cooked with someone. Though I was just getting to know them, the act of cooking with them created a feeling of familiarity. In the kitchen, I am displaced such that I can access the estranged view of my life where everything I've ever experienced has meaning simply because it happened. And I am made up of all these encounters. To inhabit the memory is to move beyond good and bad. The interpretation is silenced by the raw sensory experience. In such moments, the self that wants to ward off hurt, abandonment and loss dies. And all that is left is a bundle of mysterious relations, the facts of a life which I experience as pure dissociative joy. And my body, a trace of everything that has ever been lived, like my words, which together do not constitute my work, but rather are an extension of my body, a trace of relation. When the memory becomes vivid, there is truth and nothing else. You understand everything by forgetting who you are. You become who you are by forgetting who you are. The last night, the new friend was at my house. We stopped by the grocery store because they wanted to cook me eggs, Benedict and fried polenta to express their appreciation for the generosity I had shown them during their stay. I drifted through the grocery store in a sleep-deprived days while they plucked the ingredients from the shelf with grace. They accidentally grabbed crumpets instead of English muffins. Because I was so sleep-deprived and emotionally wound up from processing so many intense situations, my mental filters were malfunctioning. Memories kept firing at random and I continued to slide deeper and deeper into this universe of private associations, sometimes laughing to myself at the tragicomic absurdity of existence, evidenced by the twisted thoughts that were marching through my brain. As we were listening to music in my bed, the flashbacks grew more and more intense and vivid. When the Bulgarian state radio and television female vocal choir came on, I was transported back to one of my messian nighttime walks along the aurorio. Beneath the moon and stars, the desert night was so emotionally charged. I remember the pony I would see on my walks, how it would come to the fence to greet me and how seeing the pony would sometimes cause me to stop crying because the pony was just hanging out beneath the full moon. When Kiki Diakki's El Futuro came on, I thought about the beginning of my relationship with Carrie, dancing to the song together in the kitchen of the Copycat Theater in Baltimore, how strange it is to have this beginning-to-end view of a relation, how impossible it was to be so in love with someone so abusive. I looked down at my hands, the watch Ashley gave me, the garnet ring my mother gave me when I was 11. Who was I in that moment when I was filled up with everything I had ever lived through? I was nothing at my core, an assemblage of encounters and the marks left by them. The accessories I had received as gifts seemed proof of this. How did Hannah know when she wrote the Masked Magazine article that all my accessories are gifts from friends and lovers? I started to ramble manically as the force of the memory deluge intensified. I wanted to say that at the end of it all, there is light. And I thought, perhaps, perhaps it is necessary to travel through violence to reach the exalted frequency, to enter the illuminated world through the bloodstained gates, screaming, the wailing that accompanies entrance into an expulsion from sociality. What had I learned from reading Fred Moten and Bhanu Kapil about the space opened up by trauma, the space where everything becomes terribly proximate? But are you touching anything? Are your limbs falling off as you enter the Earth's atmosphere? Is your hair on fire? Embarrassment brought me back to Earth. The weird dissociative state I was in, my manic abolience put enormous distance between me and this new friend who was waiting for me to let them cook the dinner they had planned. I sensed the distance and felt ashamed of the way I acted, of falling through a mental wormhole that led me to a different world. When I returned to myself, I felt terribly alone, doomed to dwell in a world that no other being could ever possibly penetrate or understand. Is this the survivor's universe? In all the books I read on trauma, there is reference to survivors not feeling human. They think of themselves as aliens, monsters, witches, vampires, dogs, rats, snakes, cyborgs. Before I read the books, I already knew this from Banu. When we got to the kitchen, their mood shifted. They came out of their silence and I was happy to again be occupying the same world as another sentient being. They moved through the kitchen with the finesse of a ballerina for they were practiced in the art of making eggs Benedict. I stood near the refrigerator watching the dance, drifting in and out of human consciousness. I was mesmerized by their demonstration of how to poach an egg as they, and they were excited to show me because they knew that I was a lover of eggs. I still am a lover of eggs. To poach the egg, they made a whirlpool in the pot and carefully dropped the eggs in. As I stared into the pot at the floating eggs, the pot opened up into a whole universe. Each egg became a coagulating celestial body. When they started to make the hollandaise sauce, they said, come here, check this out. They were separating the egg yolks from the whites with their hands. I was impressed. I thought you would like it, they said. After working in food prep for years, they could crack eggs with one hand. The blueprint for making diner food seemed to reside deep in their unconscious, sometimes bubbling up to the surface in their art or in the form of surrealist food imagery, children's book drawings depicting floating food and trapped doors. The morning they left my house, their glasses broke. I woke up to them frantically trying to fix them and then running out the door to catch their bus. In the corner of the room, they left a little pile of things, a sweater, some tights. The objects are themselves, a tableau of absence or trace of an encounter poorly understood. Why write all this? Why write anything? Except to document all the ways in which experiences accrue to a body that does not know how to make sense of them. No matter how much ink we spill, we will never be able to get at it. The epistemological limitations of relationships, these invisible micro-transferences, the impossibility of ever knowing where someone else is at or the weird doubt you sometimes feel upon reflection when you wonder if you ever really knew someone at all. What Lily wanted to understand on the phone was the process by which a friend becomes a stranger, the metaphysical fragility of the category's friend and stranger and how the transmogrification of the friend into stranger throws your being into crisis because who I am is only ever in relation to you. What have you become passing through this life and who are you in relation to who you were after you have been mutated by everything you've ever touched? Some damage, some joy, or the way joy can never exclude damage? Why do you keep putting your hands in the fire to touch the fire? It was worth it to get burned. Thank you.