hello 2024. i am abed. i am resting, healthy, docile as a warm snake. my whole world is wrapped in my comforter.

i am editing a ms, trying to wrangle half formed words into a tolerable shape while my body rebuilds my liver. neither feel like my own yet; i am only allowed 4 tylenol a day. its grown now, but the first time i felt the hollow in my side, i squirmed. the skin folded differently when i moved, the depression poorly mapped to my sense of self. it felt like wearing the wrong shoes.

i am abed. i keep calling the ms after summer: an apocalypse

even though it makes me feel like

i should burn the whole world down, makes the pages feel too flaccid to accomplish anything. 

i have felt vivid, alive, hedonistic in past months. pain, real pain, is clarifying as a knife. i am terrified of it when it skitters away. afraid it will never return.

things taken from my body: 2.5cm pseudotumor, 61% of a liver, a gallbladder, strips of lacerated muscle (twice), five teeth mashed to pulp in my jaw, a sludgy brown stone the size of a golf ball, a liter of blood, blood, blood.

i am compelled to take the miscellany of my life and juxtapose them in pleasing sequences. in post-genre disorder Xtian Peet said, "God, make me a more pure filter through which language can pattern the mystery of my concerns."

what are my concerns? i miss my sister and my niece. i miss the flowers in the yard. i do not remember most of november but hope to wake soon and have thoughts, read books, have feelings about art. i love living and am strangely saddened by it.

 give me a syllabus, i will read it.

(Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, 1913.)