I don’t write. I speak. I don’t write fast. I speak fast. I can’t write as quickly as words spill from my mouth. I don’t read fast either. I copy fragments by hand into my notebooks — that’s how I learned to write. Reading, writing, transcribing — all of it takes time. Time stolen from some other time. A fragment carved out of a larger expanse. A cloud of signs. Sometimes, I go a long while without writing. A slump. A dark spell. Weeks, even months of silence. Nothing out of it. Crossed-out weeks in the calendar — as if they never existed. As if they didn’t count. And I feel like I’m wasting time, like a machine at a standstill. When I don’t write, I speak. I don’t need an audience to start — I can talk to myself just fine. I know how to hold myself together. I know how to live alone. I don’t always seek company. I try not to burden my friends. And when I haven’t seen them for a while, I dread the moment of reunion. Afraid we’ll have nothing to say. As if trust needed to be re-earned.

Appointments take on sudden gravity. Especially now — rare as they’ve become. The few I still have loom large. I make mountains of them. And when it’s a performance — what they call a “performance” in the world I supposedly belong to — when I must improvise, speak without knowing what I’ll say, it’s a plunge into the void. As if I were speaking face to face with that emptiness — within me, around me. To allow that kind of leap, I write a lot beforehand in my notebooks, warming up, grounding myself, outlining the terrain where I’ll stumble and wander. In the hour before I speak, I sip whisky — just a little. I can’t help it. It’s all about balance. Maybe it helps me hear what I’m saying. Maybe it helps erase it instantly. As if I needed to numb something. I often experience speech as a hallucination. I try to wake from it. I always fall short of what I expected of myself. Never satisfied. Never filled. As if my thoughts were leaking through holes. The thinking machine is faulty.

But when I write, I can revise the thoughts, trim the phrases. Writing lets me correct. I wish I could write as fast as I speak — and then still have time to cut. To begin again. Only then would it feel like I’d done something — something real. I don’t work fast. I drink fast. And when I can’t manage to work, I start to drink. It doesn’t help. I want to live fast, grow old fast, die fast — but that’s not mine to decide. And they say art is about slowing down. About mastering a slice of time. But I feel no mastery at all. So then what? A ticking bomb. A work of delay. A slamming door.

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