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by Esther Yi

I didn’t know which I wanted more of, the precise reproduction or the imprecise actuality.

I doubted the singularity of my love and thereby its truth.

“You’ve settled for a comfortable distance from him so that you can yearn without suffering. Sorry, but you’re not in love. You’re a fan. Boring, lethargic, overfed.

I heard “Moon” so many times that the word began to prismatically splinter into cousin sounds.

“Mourn,” the woman in love said. “Moron,” the man in love said.

We also offer a day in the life of being a cocaine addict, which a lot of our clients already are, except we also take away their cultural magazine subscriptions.

i cackled

“Despite everything I’ve been through, I still think that my loneliness is part of some character-building prologue to the joy of togetherness that inevitably awaits me,”

i think she burrowed into my brain and extracted this

“You’re trembling like a foal. Has no one touched you in a while? Don’t be embarrassed. Being practiced at love is exactly what ruins it.”

“You were bad for business,” I said approvingly.

Together in our renunciation of reality, we would achieve what no fan and his star had ever achieved before: mutual universality, perfect love.

I increasingly understood myself in the sound—the breathy insubstantiality of “why,” which was pulled down the throat by the density of “en.” He seemed to be asking “why” of my existence, “why” I was what I was.