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Learning any language, we are forced to learn again how to exist in that tongue, forced to relearn how to read.

This suspicion worked its way into my account of bibliophobia: If everything I am or have been has come from books, without them, I am a total blank.

Bibliophobia, a concept I’d been kicking around as a premise for a darkly comic campus novel for years, became an umbrella term for everything that had gone wrong; it turned out that my own life was that unwritten absurd campus novel.

Sometimes, paradoxically, I thought this one book could be everything: both the book that saved me (because surely it would make me eternally famous) and the one that killed me. This conviction, irrational though it is, has never left me.

Bibliophobia is many things. It is about the fear of the idea of books themselves, of particular books I have known, and of a specific, unknown and unwritten book: my own. At some point in my dramatic adolescence, I decided that I was allowed to die after I wrote one good book.

All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I’ve read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink willfully into further despair. These are the books I want to reread here, to try and explain myself, knowing full well that explanation is impossible.

But why should reading always have to generate something useful, whether it be heartwarming inspiration or ideal liberal subjects? I want to think of reading not as productivity but as a kind of produce: something that grows in whatever unpredictable way it will, sometimes smooth and beautiful and delicious, sometimes bitter and gnarled and thorny.

I am convinced that it is every writer’s fear that our books will be the death of us.

Nervous breakdown was not for the children of immigrants. It was something that happened to white people in independent films or in middlebrow realist novels.

Leaving the house is overrated. Creativity is violent. Suicidal ideation is the lightest, easiest thing in the world. It’s an invisible hobby, a fun little secret you can take anywhere, like doing Kegels at brunch or doodling in a lecture.

The thing is, nothing really tells you when it’s time to commit to a nervous breakdown; it has to happen on its own schedule.

The words are only bits of words, lines of blurred or smeary words with the occasional whole word.

The voids are where you learn what power does and what the word void can mean. The void is simultaneously the place where, for me, words first ceased to mean and where, for words, I first ceased to mean too.

From the verb ‘tangere’, 3rd conjugation: to touch, strike, influence, touch on. Words themselves are a kind of touching? Words themselves are influence? Words themselves are a form of hitting? Or the other way round? Striking or touching is all about words?

From the verb ‘iacere’, 3rd conjugation: to throw away, throw out, jerk about, disturb, boast, discuss. I had no idea what that would mean. Words themselves are being thrown away? Words themselves are boasts? Boasts themselves are words? The thrown away things are words?

Does it make it easier to control other creatures, or even peoples, us deciding that because we don’t know what they’re saying, what they’re saying doesn’t get to mean anything, or that they don’t get to have a say?

Is there a dictionary that will help us speak to a horse? I said. Most humans haven’t got clever enough to speak the languages of other creatures yet for some reason, she said. I often wonder why.

There are different realities, she’d say, and the net is a reality with designs on general reality, and I’ll prefer it if you both experience the real realities as your foremost realities.

There was no such thing as AI children. You were either an alive one, or someone who’d once been a child and was now older, or a dead one;

Why would people do that? she said. People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?

Like her body had been sliced down the middle by a scalpel, an endless spew of blood-soaked memories.

I thought of her as a living ghost.

Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.

Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow?

Her eyes glistened with soundless tears, as if all the warm affection she’d stored for me over the last twenty years was seeping out at once.

I’ve come to die, I think from the depths of my fever. I’ve come here to die. To be cut open, riddled with holes, strangled, burned. To this house as it is about to breathe fire and collapse in on itself. To lie alongside these felled logs, these heaped fragments of a giant’s shattered body.

Earth, now a glacial globe, turns on its axis with an ear-splitting screech. Continents covered in churning, cascading lava have instantly turned to ice. Thousands of birds flock over the suddenly eternally unapproachable surface. They fall asleep as they glide. Coming to, they flap their wings. Then slice through the air, glinting, like skate blades.

It was like he lived in two worlds. The room would be dark but he’d squint his eyes to look at me, as if he saw me with one eye but saw something else too with his other eye, a light that lay far beyond me.

A softness without warmth. A softness without life.

Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts any more. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can’t say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.