Anne Ishii @ill_iterate

I want to do novel writing month but just one long love letter.

November 1st 2021

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It’s November first of 2021, and time to make a wish.

The English word “love” has colonized the way we talk about this feeling, don’t you agree? The feeling I want to convey to you feels colonized by the words I am forced to use. Love at the level of the letter, leaves me wanting. How clever. Capitalism is so clever it will sell you the noose with which to hang yourself. This line has been attributed, as far as I’ve researched, to Leon Trotsky and Michael Moore. Love makes me want to be clever, swole on maxims and truisms.

I am not going to be facile about colonialism, imperialism, post-colonialism, decolonization. That’s not fair to everyone terrorized by it. Or perhaps I am being facile about empire, in that I write about my imperial love with absolute facility. Talking to you comes to me quite easily, is that love? The shame I feel for telling you too much. Is that love?

Imagine finding out that the origin of dance is a silence. I said I would rather play music on an empty stomach because it slows my head to operating speed, but what I meant was that it makes everything a little harder when my spleen is working full speed to move four stomachs, like a cow. I will give you my milk if it does not offend you.

What do I want to tell you in my love letter? All I know is the volume at which I want to say it, the frequency at which you will accept it. Let’s start with a voice in my head, and the voice in your head as you hear it in my throat. The aspect of love that is not captured by the word love is the urgency and the permanence of affection, convergence, universal time, a bell. Ring a bell for someone in love, it will find its frequency in memory.