I breathe
deeply into
the page

by Fette Sans

My dear,

Days have turned foggier since my last letter, it is as if your absence has wrapped itself around the light.

I try not to look at the weather app, so that when the snow eventually breaks over me during one of my walks, my conjuring of you, at last, will powder my whole face. For now, it is only this clammy grey roaming everywhere, even in this room. Tell me it is kinder and warmer where you are.

Before I forget, I have to tell you that I have been gifted this ceramic pomegranate. It is not entirely a gift tho, as the thing was among a bunch of other things tagged for donation by the woman whose flat I clean on Thursdays. She pointed to the box in the hallway telling me that I was welcome to take anything. I looked inside and saw the pomegranate among the clutter. It fitted just right in my hand, so I took it. A gift to a quiet beggar, I guess. I wish she hadn’t said anything, and I had just taken it on my way out. A steal is the truest gift don’t you think?

It is bright crimson red with a bulging crown, pierced with a very small hole. At first, I thought I’d use it for the stem of one flower but once I got home, I decided to place an incense stick through it. I grabbed a chair and sat down to watch the ashes slowly dust the pomegranate until the smoking stick had turned twig.

Today, the fog is the thickest and it is also when I miss you and I feel you inside my body the most, like too-large a swallow of hot tea blooming confusion to my chest, becoming tentacular tissue in my stomach. What delicious burn of nonsense invading me, this intoxicated fluid of wants moving parts of myself with such delicate aching. What are the acceptable boundaries of the strange? Seconds that feel like hours in this state of outraged hunger I seem to always be in. (Or is that nausea?)

So on such a day, I force slips of the tongue by scavenging for unrelated stuff online. (Have you ever stuck a shovel into the ground and thought of your own grave?) A bulky construction site barrier being removed like a dance by an excavator, the lowest sound threshold of human hearing, Oumuamua’s return, bird murmuration against grey skies, or a man smoking on camera while counting the number of seeds inside a pomegranate.

Do you remember this video I sent you, the one I shot in Istanbul of a man pressing pomegranates for juice? I just thought of what you had said then, how you liked when things that are delicate and special to you are treated brutally in other places. It made me think of how the world has turned into this topography of contradictions since this, since you, by showing yourself to me everywhere and nowhere. Do you also hear this rattle of everything that makes concentration so ineffective? Paranoid porosity—I’m so filled with you. How did the world turn this relentless pareidolia revealing only your image? I can feel my hunger undoing manners, carving bruises into my insides and slapping my thighs into the wettest of cries just to connect the things that aren’t there with all the things that are always too loudly here. My hunger wanting to feed you. It is the irreverence of the flesh summoning me to break open the ceramic fruit to find the seeds I’d make you eat one by one, each a drop of me.

You know, before I used the pomegranate as a censer, I held it in my hand, as if my insistence in staring would turn its smooth surface into the coarse one of the fruit, as if staring at my hand long enough would turn it into yours. My reduplicative paramnesia to your holographic principle lol. How can you fucking bear it? All surfaces becoming flesh—yours, always yours. I licked the ceramic in this mad craving for your sanguinity and my spit became this spell of a smudge between your room and mine, the spell that would make you appear to me once my saliva had evaporated. I tried to follow the finger system you devoted to my throat, like a ghost dancing the last days of a gutted house, my throat the unfired membrane of this fruit that isn’t one, my throat this wet inhibition that isn’t yours.

(I breathe deeply into the page.)
Will you write soon?

The universe isn’t listening, and yet it diligently makes its way through the fog, looking like you, while I hold the strings of my yearning body and go on with the day.

Your

Fette

If you would like to receive a handwritten letter, please send an email to Fette Sans (fettttte@gmail.com) (linked to my name) with a postal address.

Fette Sans has a conceptual and interdisciplinary practice that includes the production of images, writing, performances, online gestures, filmmaking, discussions, and installations.Games of dissociative identities and the stories we tell ourselves to collect evidence of what has happened are recurring components in her work. She is interested in the ambiguity of what constitutes an image’s residue.

Concerned with social systems, representation, and technology, she develops obsessive rituals, collaborations, and speculative narratives to question these issues. Rituals are interesting because there are ways of expressing repetition and the longing for security while accepting the risks associated with the very act of ceremonial reiterations: boredom itself.