visions of repetition. you think of being encrusted, lying rooted like a barnacle as the layers become rigid around you. not unpleasant, until things pull and orbit, until eventually they snap. this is maybe a type of patience.
you think of V, before things got wrapped up in themselves. She lies immobile on the carpet and you feed her cabbage and eggs, lifting each forkful into her mouth, when her back hurts so bad after planes.
you walk with her later, along the highway to buy a futon, for the back. you talk rapidly, functionally, like you are laying out a great plan. her mother calls, and you eavesdrop, to practice your spanish. V and her mother are, you think, the only two native speakers in the world whose conversations you can understand clearly, you don't know why. happy in a rioplatense-specific way. washed over with sadness. just speaking more slowly. after the call, the two of you try to talk in spanish then as you walk, but you're so scared of missing the words in response, of not knowing everything. you make her say it all again in english.
in the store, she chooses a bad futon, one that creates an unresolvable emotional dynamic. the tensions of her life will make her not want to sleep on it and the tensions of her back will make her need to, they will pull at her and it all might hurt forever. you wait to tell her this, though, until she's already bought it, and you're walking back along the highway.
perhaps this was things already being wrapped up, always being so. you miss her. you send her photos, of you and A and salads. leaves, flakes of parmesan, smiles, all squished together. her in paris, you with faces she doesn't recognize in photos.
you then think, of course, of M. you can never do her justice: to think of her distinctly, as a thing with shape rather than a landscape, all-encompassing, is something you haven't done in a long time. you think of her more as a negative space, made from the outlines, of tears, screams, lying prostrate, dark rooms that blur together. these things stretch out in your mind into a long, sub-lucid haze. Years wrapped up in themselves.
in these ways you begin to falter, to wonder if all of it is not so different. you discuss wretchedness as a continual and essential state, a way of being that one inhabits. you need them to be different. in your head it all starts to appear again as a deep pit, the kind that used to fascinate you singularly, that you could attach yourself to the side of in a kind of desperation. you talk about this over sushi, always over sushi, about your worries, but they dissipate, are gone as soon as they are spoken.
in the morning you feel a renewed confidence. that it need not be so, that all the things you love are all the things that are good, that you could be happy forever, like a vast expanse.