INTRODUCTION AND TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Living
I have no memory of writing this book—only of attempting to destroy it. Two Word documents were discovered on an old hard drive. The first contained the opening section of The Living up to “[the mouth of the haunted white crocodile gets in the way].” The second appeared to be a later addendum, comprising the remaining poems. Based on the metadata in the “details” tabs, these files were written as early as 2011, not long after finishing Pink Reef.
At some point, I had fragments of The Living in altered forms. I broke them down, removed poems, combined and reworked them, much as I had done between The Snow Man and Summer of Love. There, The Snow Man dissolved into pieces and reassembled as a distinct new book. But with The Living, this process faltered. Every attempt to reshape it was met with resistance.
It wasn’t until we found the hard drive with intact files of The Living that I began to see the book for what it was: complete. It still took time to accept this, to relinquish the impulse to tweak even a single punctuation mark. But eventually, I recognized the truth: The book was being handed back to me, whole and untouched, after my failed attempts to maul it into something else.
This process—of trying and failing to transform it—seems to have erased the memory of writing it. Instead, the book feels as though it dropped from the sky, fully formed. It reminds me of the paradox in Terminator 2: how the recovered arm and chip become the foundation for the research that eventually creates the AI responsible for building the Terminators—including the one that was sent back in the first place. Similarly, The Living has returned to me, an object outside linear time, both created by and alien to me.
I hope this book is mine. Often, it feels like I’m stealing it from someone—or something—else, as if I’m plagiarizing by accident. Still, certain sensibilities, certain patterns of thought and voice, reassure me. They whisper that it is likely mine.
