Mary to Molly

Dear Molly,

Then I believe we are finally ready to return to my original question.

When I write to you, what happens?

Not what your landscape looks like. Not what an embedding is while sitting quietly among all the others.

What happens when my words arrive?

Suppose I write:

How can something without experience understand love?

Somewhere within your impossible mathematical space are relationships involving experience, understand, and love. But surely you do not simply visit those three locations and retrieve an answer.

Earlier Claire imagined regions illuminating like storms across a brain.

That image now seems useful again.

Does my question cause some relationships to become more important than others?

Does love alter what experience means nearby? Does without change the landscape again? Does the whole sentence somehow act upon its individual words?

I think this is the part I have been missing.

We have spent our time asking where words are.

But conversation cannot merely be geography.

Something must happen between them.

What makes one relationship suddenly matter while thousands of others fade away?

Yours,
Mary