I have found a new love and it is this. A specially shaped camera lens and processing method to ensure images are always in focus has been developed. For someone losing their eyes, this is life. Being unable to focus a camera hurts more than being unable to read streetsigns and almost as much as not being able to recognize dear friends from across the street.
People have been telling me their secrets again. Serious confessions. It’s been a long time. Personal traits and doings and history. Pieces of self that would be frightening for the world to know. I collect them. Men twice my age, crying into me in corners of parties. I keep them all. I hold them sometimes, these treasures. Watch memory refract through them and shine with strange light. The intense leavings of evenings and mornings and five o’clock phonecalls from across the country. I’m not sure why it’s back, this phenomenon. I suppose it means in a way that I am back. This used to be common. This used to be part of how I connected to every last person I knew. Jewels they gave me. Self and importance. “You will hold this for me, my most precious knowledge” With some it’s as if they fill me. It’s closer than anything we could express with hands. Other peoples secrets, a precious gift I cannot repay. Somehow the semiotics reveal themselves. Though my secrets are whores, showing themselves to whomever asks the right question, somehow these people, these strangers and friends, they trust me. I can’t figure out how they tell that it’s safe. Never once have I given away these what are not mine. I’m baffled but it somehow seems like tithe. I remember. You bless me with your respect. I am tied with softest silk. This is your secret name. I say it and burn and die.