A Love Letter to Jerry Saltz
For a man named Jerry Saltz, I want to know what love is. You wrote me in 2020 when the world was at once holding its collective breath and bleeding out at the same time. We were kids then. You had just published a book, or could have been a coffin. These days, these days grow long and it has been three years since the groundhog died in its shadow. A glitch in some system, perhaps we have entered into the parallel universe Fitzgerald never dreamed about. You told me, I have everything I need. You told me, that I was right here, there, near, where I needed to be. Did you know they have an app now where instead of reading the physical book, you can instead take a photo and an AI will read it to you? Could an AI have written back to me when I pushed so many hopes to you? Could they have anticipated what I needed to hear, based on emotion, not on data. Could they have self-taught empathy as you self-taught genuineness? As you self-taught? The Rousseau in you, the Rousseau of AI. You say work, work, work, and work some more. You show us it is not as glamorous as we so need it to be. The genius in Rothko was the same variant that harbors in you, the same that harbors in me. No, we do not share the same effects. Mine are asymptomatic. But I know it’s there. I want a life that exists in your eyes, the eyes that have recently been cut up and sown back together. A red thread, etching in time, etching in flesh. I never knew love could feel so unexpected. I had you planned out, for what I sold myself I needed to find. And I found the opposite in you, and have never ceased to smile. I walk in the light, hoping to find a glimpse of what you felt. What you feel. For a man named Jerry Saltz, you are sweet.
2022