I am shocked by how the open rate of this substack account absolutely plummeted after a redesign of the landing page. I’m talking like, 100 to 1. You may have noticed I’ve changed it back to its original layout. But how will you know to catch up on old letters? I am going to try to redesign the format of my love letters, too. Who benefits from simple articulation if it is not also direct? 100 to 1. If you aren’t reading it then no one is.

Should I beseech you through design? A tree fell in a forest you were not in. I will shift my energy. Wear silver instead of gold. Days go by I stare in one direction while muttering to myself in silence: I have to look in another direction or I will go mad.

I was so overwhelmed with longing today that I went blind for a moment. I think I am losing my mind. If I am thinking, I cannot be losing my mind. I’ve simply lost my mind. Design by subtraction, an architect recently told me. Everything looks better when you subtract. Lost mind.

I beg you to subtract from me.

Focal points if the canons in my eyes were relaxed. Focus groups my anxieties that this is the lifetime in which I grab you by the throat so I can make you finally hear yourself say yes. I heard on a podcast that elevators were designed with reflective surfaces on the interior—and initially a simple mirror would do the trick—because people were freaking out when there was nothing to look at while being transported vertically, magically. I wish I liked podcasts more. The word “podcast” is god awful. Is magic a dumb word because I believe in it a lot lately. It makes me sound childish. I’d flip out if we had to look at mirrors when we were inside elevators, instead of at each other.

If scruples concerned me as much as I say they do, I would be more scrupulous. What on earth is my father doing on an American horse ranch in Okinawa aside from taking souvenir photos for me as evidence he is alive and well. Video clips of monks chanting in a temple designed for major audiences feel more appropriate because I don’t want to believe there is still an occupation. He avoided returning to Japan for almost fifty years and I don’t want to believe in such a thing as exile. Who’s the idiot now.

I wish that seeing everyone’s faces in yours did not unnerve me so. Your gaze upon the world unnerves me so. I want to belong to you. That is also a design, a decision, a drawing. Your terrible penmanship is a subtraction.