1 May 2021

And so I’m caught once more within an interminable recollection, in scenes that seem to always be playing vividly across the foothills of the Tianshan; and so I’m stuck in place chasing traces that grow ever more opaque; and so I stand here and there as you ask me, glowing faintly with the question: “Will you come back?”

I say to myself: I’m there here.

You say something else across the void for confirmation. You say it to me and I, to us standing there, footprints fading asymptotically into dust. I say Je est une autre; I say this place is a part of me. I whisper it to you imperceptibly, across time, wherever you are.

Sleep finally finds me—catches me somewhere between those afternoons spent sipping tea in felt yurts, catches me somewhere among those summers by now long bygone, catches me somewhere that’s directionless, consigned to an eternal tangle of already have beens and now always never could bes.

In sleep I become sedimented into so many other elsewheres, into such erstwhile visions of belonging, of being in this place with you…you whose name is 某君，whose name is 今隐其名…but you and I have become outside of that place and that past. It is wholly past.

بىز بۇ يېردىن غايىب بولىۋاتىمىز

There are cameras everywhere. Everyone and everything is accounted for; we are nowhere we were not meant to be; we are nothing if not a micro-physics of enmeshed and eminently mappable activity; we are congealed into algorithms; we are the pulsating omnipresence of high modernity.

永別了，親愛的世界！

告別了，這以前的一切！

I still feel the pall of terror in your face; I still see the flash of panic in your children’s eyes. I still am witness to the quiet destruction of all those languid moments that now will never be remade.

永別了！永別了！ئاغام !  永別了！جانىم !

You and I have become something else; you and I keep a gracious distance; you and I gesticulate in morse code. You aren’t quite who you were. I aren’t quite who I was. I say je est une autre; I say this place is a part of me. I whisper it to you imperceptibly, across time, wherever you are.