It’s as easy as it sounds in my grandparents’ letters to live a normal life under an authoritarian regime. You love or fall out of love, you go on summer adventures, defend a dissertation. The trains keep running, cows keep giving milk.

“Hard is the edge of a shadow attached to a blade that drips”

“Strange that the absence or presence / of color isn’t black or white, but words.”

Maybe I’m still working from a place of collective composition toward a singular voice, trying to derive one true chord from that old cacophony. The steel strings went slack—too much tension over too much time.

“In that moment, he looked just like a boy to Irma. Head tilted down, palm turned out and facing her. She wanted to scoop his head between her hands.”

“His compositions reinvented classical music, perhaps because he no longer could hear what others were creating.”

On how writing can help to heal, or at least cope.

“As I sat drenching myself in Giono’s world, it was as if I knew I had a soul.”

“What’s missing, what isn’t there, creates the poetry.”