Here we are — I’ve taken to burning incense lately. I buy it on the internet and it arrives wrapped in sheets of murderous plastic. What else can I do but chuck them in the recycling and bear the slim coffin of sticks aloft, in my hands, into the study, where it slips unobtrusively onto my desk as if by accident? As if I haven’t, at this middling hour of life, fallen prey to marketed ritualism? Devious. At this point I think of you. I wonder if it was all a trick; if in the end that’s all we’re doing to each other, with each other, for each other, playing tricks. And then I’m rearranging things on my desk as if wilful beauty will make the ritual less of a farce. The incense box says Japanese Cypress. I light a stick and watch: it doesn’t self-cannibalise like a candle. It transmutes, gummed powder and wood into ash, matter into equal matter, and then it crumbles. It doesn’t do this with a candle’s inexorable drama — slowly then all at once — but in clean, quotidian intervals: it burns, then it dies, and then it burns, and then it dies. As if at any moment it might pause its dying, hold together a little longer. And each grey death lies curled at the base of the burner like a worm. I wonder at how the end had come so soon for us, so suddenly, with my taste still on your tongue. Why? You don’t owe me an answer, but despite the world not everything is about debt. What do you fear? Me, I fear never finding it again: specificity. But perhaps everyone settles for the general in the end. At the end of my life it will be your young face I see. Herald of newness. Herald of possibility. I won’t send you this letter, but you might end up reading it one day regardless. I hope you do. If you are reading it now, know this: my answer is yes.