Hold out your hand. Hold out your hand and look at it, at the way the fingers curve and shape themselves towards holding something that’s not even there. Look at the way it ends; at the horizon of your palm, the sunset edge of your nail against the thing beyond; look at your ending and the beginning of something new.
Everything starts, everything ends, but everything connects. There’s a point in between; a space of challenged hierachies and unsure spatiality, a point where it’s neither one thing nor the other but rather the space in between. The shadow of a pen. The curve of a coffee cup. The moment just before your cat walks across the laptop, typing their own novel in their own peculiarly persistent semiotics.
I am returning more and more to these moments, these edges. These endings, these beginnings. These spaces where a book finishes and another stops, and I am becoming convinced that everything happens in the space in between. The pre-read. The post-read. The read itself. Perhaps everything is reading and thus we are all texts, all of us, being read and making readings of each other every day.
My skin, your skin, the poetics of us. The poetics of our space, our performed, lived lives, the poetics of love and loss and hate and happiness. We exist in moments but we exist between them as well, and oh we are made of such serendipity.
Fall in love with a book, fall out of love, be part of a whole expression of love, a semiotics of passion, and you are part of it before, after, always. Literature is love, living. It is the language that we are given to understand the world; it is given for us, to us, by us, from us : Apart, a part, parted; amo, amas, amat.
We are such wonders in this world, and in such, we are lost and we are found, and the ties that bind, that break, that make us are word-formed and cursive-cut. Language; loss, life. It’s all here, always.
Daisy May Johnson 