hinterland ovenbird You wander the hinterlands of language. The symbols that used to flow from your fingers (making words, making sense) no longer take the shapes you try to impose. You show your wife a blue piece of construction paper upon which you have scrawled lines that imitate the familiar whorls of the alphabet, but the marks are only approximations of meaning. You say, “Here. Here I wrote two sentences.” You point to a tangle of ink and you read aloud. You can see the language that your brain wanted to form in the obscure scribbles, but your wife sees nothing of substance. “We don’t see what you see,” she says and she implies the opposite as well: You no longer see what we see. The visual world is becoming more dense, more haunted, more difficult to navigate. The ideas that live in your head can no longer be translated into text. Your letters regress into the tentative scrawls of a toddler–more abstract art than script. The dark blue ink swims on the lighter blue paper. Words float to the surface as if rising from the depths. There are occasional bubbles of coherence and I catch a few before they pop: “learn,” “duo.” And words that might be words but aren’t: “naru,” “cachon,” “asso.” The words that are not words move across the page like aurochs thundering over the rock walls of the Lascaux caves. You live in a world without writing now and I imagine you setting your hand down on the paper, leaving a print with your life line cutting across the center like a tight-rope, trying in any way you can to say “I am still here.” 250626 what's it to you? who go blather from