Consider this a message in a bottle. Consider it a fossil, a remain. A text.

Who you are: we don’t know. The pronouns are problematic. The problems are pronominal: you are you because not-me, not-I, not-we. I love you and I don’t know why. Can’t say why. You are the idea of the question, the vested idea. The poison and the gift.

THE UNNAMED ELEMENTS

are too innumerable to record. We do not exist in a vacuum, despite the presumption and desire, on the part of those in charge, that we remain incapable of recognizing what we are a part of, the roles in which we’ve been cast.

The anger and despair that gave rise—let’s be honest—to both Love and Anti-Love did not themselves arise in a vacuum, don’t feed on air alone. I could list the ambient and direct forces acting on each of us in this story, these stories, I could track their crescendos as they leave record after record in the dust, or I could let you list them yourself, in the margins of this or of one of the books in your own stack.

If I prefer, if I choose, the latter, it’s not only out of lassitude or nervousness about the inadequacy of my efforts (my current limits); it’s also out of a stubborn belief in the power of marginalia. It must be the case that, under certain conditions, the margins can rewrite the text.

POSES

Because the universe itself was rearranging, individuals began rearranging their own universes as well, not only the husband and the wife coming apart but other husbands and wives, and husbands and husbands and wives and wives, and pairs of people who had eschewed the institution of marriage but who had entered other institutions of their own design, of care and resource sharing and of rules and infractions—all of these were sent into a new state of entropy, of comings-apart and comings-together, as if riding the crest of the universe-level changes that were, with ever-increasing velocity, on the approach—an approach everyone sensed but no one could satisfyingly articulate.

The question arose also, not only with Pablo and his reluctant former partner in non-primacy, not only in the writings of the anarchist or of the other anarchists, of whether the dyad or the private family could possibly be the way to weather the approaching storm.