Just look at us, headless as usual, sitting around this large oak table. I’m leaning into it, elbows trembling, and you—what are you going to do? Why not sit here whispering in French—tell me something ancient; about Oedipus, about the brown stains water makes on the oldest stones.

Too many storms have already happened. We know this. But what we don’t know, for instance, is like a skin.

I see you doctored around the eyes—your entire face falling into the eyes. And in between your index and middle fingers: The Smallest Camera Ever. I need only to breathe and it snaps that.

The table was made for people like us, people who would rather eat standing. In between breakfast and dinner we leave, keep leaving—of the five ways out of the house, only two are dangerous.

So we laugh silently, subtitled, and the things between us are so thoroughly modern we almost own the white space, the ether, the flea markets erected every Sunday where you move from basket to basket in search of sad music.

I feel your fingers the way a piano must—hands that belong to winter, the bone of it breaking, the gauze that always follows. You took 2000 thumb-sized pictures of your body. It was never a question of finishing. The surface gives way to more surface—sweat sticks to the hairs, pores go open and shut—skin so bright, it’s mute.