A/B

On my last night in Oivalos we sit on either side of your kitchen table discussing desire. You tell me that an artist friend of yours asked you to write a love letter to the desired object. That you have begun this letter but will probably stop, feeling you are about to rewrite Either/or. You say the only thing that comes to mind when thinking of the desired object is that time we were smoking on the balcony and you said “you know what your problem is? - you don’t want anything” and I felt proud and defeated. These were your words. I would not have used a rhetorical question. But it doesn’t matter what I said, or what it meant. This token we have passed back and forth so many times (continue now to pass over the surface of this table) that it has lost all reference to the worldly thing it once represented. It serves now only to mark out pathways in the space between us. And so we continue in this way, passing our tokens in the half-light of the kitchen, composing a faux-bourdon with the things we mean and the things we say. Talking into the eternal twilight of Oivalos we are finally interrupted by your daughter, whose lightness, like the sunrise, parts the clouds.

It’s very simple, he said.

There are two possibilities.

Either

a world in which one action, repeated

has an ever smaller number of consequences

until finally

you find yourself sitting at your desk at 3am

late one February

maniacally writing variations on a theme

you have already composed

three or four times

a world in which one action, repeated

releases a proliferation in the rose

bloom upon

which is then cut back bloom upon

as when deadheading – bloom,

my little

so that the growth bird

might begin again.

Sophie Fetokaki is an interdisciplinary artist, vocalist and writer living between Cyprus and the U.K. She likes, as much as possible, to make art in the margins of experience. Her first poetry book epigraphē is forthcoming in 2019 with 1913 press. Her work can be found at sophiefetokaki.com.