12 janvier 2026 . 7.35p

Greg,

I’m only writing to you right now. And besides: you’re one of the only people who still writes me back via letter. Is it because we’re all old &  busy, now? No time for letters? I read somewhere that psychologists say that time has flattened. Flattened with the advent of the screens we all seem to scroll endlessly. And with time flattened so, stretched thin, scrolled upon … is there, then, no sense of urgency? One needs a senseof urgency to write a letter. One needs to be at the precipice of themselves. Or maybe I’m getting too pedantic? Maybe it is because we’re all old & busy, now… I turned 38 this year. I can hardly believe it, but of course it happened because I was born in 1987 and that was 38 years ago from now.

And yes – another new address, & why? I had to move unexpectedly at the beginning of Octobre. A month before that: I awoke to my downstairs neighbor turning my bedroom light on & watching me as he took up the entire doorway. He’d broken into my apartment in the middle of the night & a few moments after I somehow, deliriously, got him to leave my room, I had to push his body off of mine after he lunged at me, threw his arms around me, & tried to kiss me. This while his wife & two kids were asleep downstairs – the floor below us. I didn’t even know his name; I’d maybe bumped into him 2-3 times in the year I’d lived there. And I won’t even get into how it brought up things, other times I’ve been assaulted in my bed, at night, that I thought I’d dealt with. Or the parts about how I needed to get the police & the court system involved. Or how the landlord refused to do or address anything. It’s all too much and was largely infuriating on so many levels.

The night this all happened, I’d been, earlier, finishing the recording of a piece I’d written  – a sonic translation – of a single line in a Marina Tsvetaeva poem. “Poem of the end.” I’ve been, lately, for maybe the past few years, been considering & working with sound as translator. It’s something I’ve always done with my work, & sound projects more specifically, but you know – it takes years of practice to actually articulate anything about a process. The line in the poem goes: “A weeping. I lick the fading, salty.” (Who

writes things like that !?) I’ll have to read it to you, then. It’s online in this compilation my friend Rymer curated & released.

And speaking of Marina: I never thanked you properly for sending me your translations of her before you left for your trip. I read them on the Metro North heading to the City. And you, of course, were the one to introduce me to her all those years ago. And – the only person to ever read her to me aloud in both Russian & English. But when, even, was that? It couldn’t have been the last Gates in 2010. But it was in the basement, I remember that so clearly….