OUR

Year of the Tiger

Our pleasures are the greatest known to humans: finding new hardcover books, repeating out the fantastic turns of words we find, listening to our headphones in a coffee shop while casting about secret smiles and occasional notes.

Like survivalists storing up durable goods for the long run, we only buy hardcover books. These are not books for a collection like someone who might buy decorative spoons but the key wit of key names which will be read repeatedly until they seep back out like music and laughter in quiet places. We repeat the lines we find as though we might be violins in the void, hoping that they will cause someone, maybe ourselves, to jump up, ruffling our hair in the brief instant before we bruise our heads on the ceiling. We speak only in the first person plural because we share everything in common: the joy of our trade, singing along stupidly, jocular jostling bellies, languid eyes and other harmless missiles.

Jennifer smiles at the coffee shop, upstairs where we can watch the silver sky, when I begin to gesticulate while caught in the throes of a treatise on Chinese ecology or Uyghur vowel harmony. It’s the writing and the music that makes me gesture, because these two combined make us concentrate and forget a bit about the heavy rudeness of world and the hard work of asserting our spiritual existence. We’re listening to the same music simultaneously on separate headphones so Jen writes me notes about the music on the back of her scientific charts. Mostly: I love this or I love that. I love Jennifer because she sits with me for hours and laughs at the things we like. I’ve known her since she was a beautifully blank-faced girl of 23, seven years later we get along better, more kindred souls than amateur miners of illustrated ideas. We are beginning to break into an elegant trot.