Svetlana + Belmont

Years later after I was just an afterthought and you’d been in London for research (business?) sending me those cruel screen shots from your smart glasses out of the blue, sometimes I went to my bookcase, pulled random HC books of yours off the shelf that I’d held on to for totally nostalgic reasons after we broke up, and then while my family was in the DAM (Digital Ambient Room) watching old reruns of Moon Survivor:  Sea of Tranquility and Intergalactic House Hunters (or possibly Fast and Furious 15: Space Station Spinners, I honestly don’t remember), I’d read your notes in the margin and cry at the sight of your penmanship.  You wrote things just like the way you talked: 

What a dialectical bummer, this is Lermontov Redux, such a flawed masculinist narrative, diachronic baby babble, SO FRIGGING OBVIOUS:  the problem here is ineffective encryption code-breaking software and not firewall reconstruction firmware (come on guyz!).

Most people would find your notes boring or pointless, but not me.  I felt like we were having a private conversation between the pages.  I savored those moments of secret communion.  <----Wait, am I using that word right?  You were always the human dictionary in our relationship . . .