A letter to the book
The first hour has arrived, the seventh soon
Sent
It is the second day after the first hour.
It has stopped being only his. We Were Here can be heard now, wherever you listen. Every door to it, in one place.
The room in that hour outlasted the two people in it. Yesterday it started outlasting him as well.
What follows has not been said aloud anywhere else. The hour marked VII has a name. Borrowed. Longing unmakes steady things.
Its door is already standing, and the hour itself arrives on the eleventh of September.
Where the hours are listed, the name is arriving one letter at a time, a gold rule holding the place of each letter still waiting. It will not be whole there until the twenty-ninth of August. Anybody whose name is not in the book will spend the week guessing at it.
The book was never a list of names. It is the order in which things are told.
