It was a sort of moment. Fleeting or, rather, skipping in on the act of inging. So much I want always to say, though it is very much unnecessary: already understood. Stairs depict the problem of inequity. One is always above, and then the thoughts are as well. Is heading down to street level an act of depletion in some metaphysical sense? Is the oxygen thinner here and that is why I find myself so tired and wondering back to times when I wondered, asking myself how? C— had a picture in mind, something elemental, but the explanation was wildly premised in grey, which brings me to her eyes. I continually forget that this is not my story. Is separation like cleaving? A disjoined but conjoined sense of oneself, not unmiserable in the divided state but still yearning for the original? Can the original be understood, returned to, acted upon? Or is it always fresh, an act of refreshing? The answers seem unmitigatedly ambiguous.

It is rather stunning, Jude’s sudden honesty, though rather unexplainable (the statement, not the act). From the fourth floor to the ground I receive several interpretations from whatever it is outside of myself she calls forth. I see the answers in every breath on these cold mornings; each one of us lacks the true conviction to not change our minds with every exhale (do I speak for the universal? I do, I must, or I speak only for us, whoever we collectively assume to be). Her ubiquitous gaze denies my ability for secrecy and I return to my senses of misassumption, my leniency to my own protean mind, her protean desires.
In a book she left behind a note was left that, when removed from context and put next to one another, every third word formed a poem:

“We talked of unconventional conversion.
It was late, the fastidious time
when to talk of talking is to remove
yourself from words.

Yes, Jude;
No, Jack.

The words come off the tongue like cuts.
“Somebody has died here,
or will,” you say, not quite as glibly

as I’d like. It’s the removal
that adds the weight, the taking away
is not any sort of replacement.

The collected works,
the s’s and l’s left open for argument,
the distich a failure of metaphor

(neither of us really likes
anything, it’s all either felt …)

I let the cold night in through a cracked glass
room, and begin to think again of you.
The aura is cut away. Words drop
in some unimaginable weightlessness.”

For what it’s worth, silence is the resistance to walking down the steps, to falling again for a one that can, but is dubious of the intention of her desire.