The year is over and will always be what it was, except that certain retrospective revelations in coming years will allow its life some kind of dynamic continuity, like in Blow Up. For example, maybe my cousin X will realize (too late?) that her exiled lover – the handsome watercolorist with whom I always got along so well – should not have been exiled. Or should have been exiled to a different place, a zone still connected somehow to the tissue of her loving. Not meaning to give her advice on how to conduct her life, I must in any case say that really I've always been of the opinion that my cousin has the capacity to maintain many lovers simultaneously: indeed the complexity of her psychological makeup and the majestic breadth of her affections make such an arrangement almost a necessity for her, not to mention for her lovers. Who who has loved my cousin would ever feel capable of loving someone else's cousin, or someone else themself? I hope my cousin in incorporating this text into the internet does not alter it in any way and feels from me only the most cousinly love and the best wishes for her coming year. Also anyone else who reads this should feel themselves receiving similar wishes.

I accidentally came across this photograph today. It had been misfiled in our archives under "Transdniester Affairs"; an embarrassing error, I admit, but the image has captivated me so much that I feel compelled to send it to my cousin and have her disseminate it through her channels, these channels.

I shared my office today with Rina, and now she is gone. She was here for pleasure: the pleasure of drinking cordials with me, the pleasure of drinking tea with my older brother.
Also she was here for work. She and I have a common project, so I occasionally share my office with her (with her and with the others besides, the regular ones) and we usually get a lot done. We choose a day when the Moldovan National Library is not demanding very much work of its Acquisitions Director – which I'm afraid is most days, due to the size of our budget – and she comes with me to the office. Usually we have tea with my brother at home and then we come to the office. Rina lives in Ribnit, Ribnita. Not very near: she comes rarely enough that it's special when she does.
Our project is hard to describe. It has to do with peoples' feelings. Also with the ways in which their relationships to those feelings influence the substance not only of their own bodies but also of the other bodies and objects into contact with which they come. We experiment mostly on each other; sometimes my colleagues get involved. We use film to record the ways in which light relates to each other's bodies – how it makes colors and textures depending on its intensity and on other undetermined things. There are other aspects: automatic writing on 3x5 cards, with which we then play Pit. And other things, other things.
I'm always sad when Rina leaves.

I didn't think I wanted that book
but it turned out it was really a book I wanted
and when I figured out I could get it pretty easily
I went and did that.
The book was written by a person,
who knows who, some guy,
a person seemingly good but who knows really,
a guy who'd come somehow anyway to be of uncommon concern to me.
Calle Donceles: a whole street of bookstores, complete sets of Lenin in Castilian translation, cheap. This was before I'd returned to Moldova; my bike was in good trim, lanky-framed & tight. I mounted it and sailed through the Zócalo: think of me, when I was young! A powerful black Raleigh, fixie-rigged, my long legs driving, my smile flies on ahead of my head, ahead of my face, flies on, eager eyes, flies to the anticipated pages of the anticipated book!

The city I live in is unlike the city you live in. In my city we don't have internet. What you read here in pixels I write with pencils, dull ones: I send the scraps to my cousin X in Vienna and she puts them onto a computer. My office is gorgeous: five or six faulty pencil-sharpeners, much wood, no internet. Also glass and concrete, and smudgy pencil-written web logs in neat piles. There's so little to do in this high place but I love to be here, watching the birds move, remembering other places. One place I remember had bookstores, many of them: a whole street of bookstores!

Where did the strings of this year go? a string can unravel to threads, but where did the threads go?

I am sitting at my desk in the office I share on the top floor of the National Library; I have spent the last two hours reading web logs. I feel enriched by the lives swarming around me and am moved to merge my own with them, even as the waters of the Dniester are merged with the brackish Karadeniz tides.