item #0044

Please close your eyes. I'm sitting at home and it is morning. I can think of no greater affirmation of the correctness of these decisions than to say my mouth has been closed tightly for days. I have been utterly alone in this work, wearing myself out. Contact is rare at the best of times. Ten years without love. Death changed everything. So few understand, and I am no teacher. Such a fait accompli - one I can neither decode nor convincingly transform. I see everything in sections. Even after 31 years, I'm still sectioning and seeing the merit of it. All my archives - here, in this room; my love of storage, my envy of the past; the peering eyes; the sliced and pitted lids, gaping. Friends. Oh how I have loved. But no more. Now, I’m hopelessly exact but without means. My research has ended. Everything is revealing. Everything confuses. The clarities I enjoyed are no longer the lesson in humiliation they once were. I know what suits me, but my confidence is concluded. Jerome