2022 was a fragmented love letter

Notes to myself & others found on my phone

Dear reader,

Swallow, as you may well know, is a documentation project that plays with memory and location. Today’s entry glances at 2022 through the lens of the notes periodically left on my phone throughout this year, all dated, and out of order: either written to myself, to others, or from others.

I wrote to you this year, in flaw and fragmentation. And today I write to you of the same.

I want to thank you. Thanks for being here. All swallowed up.

Swallow is currently undergoing construction, and in 2023 will be taking new form(s). I look forward to sharing this new chapter with you. Before we leave 2022 behind—though this is a somewhat arbitrary Gregorian line—I want to ask you: what is kept in the notes of your phone? What is inside your journals. Your photos. Voice notes. The leftovers—are they framed, or are they burnable? Can they be reused or repurposed? Are they better off untouched?

What to do with all this living.

With love from Tokyo,

Jes

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In loud places it’s difficult to talk to someone. You can’t always hear the other person, and sometimes you can barely hear yourself. Even if you’re shouting and can feel your throat strings pulling themselves into word shapes, nothing seems to come out. It isn’t until you resurface from the brick-building-of-many-floors that you realize you were completely submerged—either above or below ground—stuck within sound that was louder and more powerful than yours. When you return to the world of balanced noise, there remains a thin layer between you and everything else. Cotton in your ears. Throat raw with Trying. You wonder when what happened to you will wear off. 

Weeks, usually months after they’re transcribed, I find notes on my phone that were written in loud places—like small texts, but typed face to face, side by side; things that were written to the person standing next to me when we had given up on using our voices to speak.

September 4th, 2022, 2:44

I said this song is from 2027!
…when we met. 

August 28th, 2022, 2:57

Borrowed time  Like Maybe I don’t know when I will see you or Z again I want to cherish it

There are several notes on my phone written to myself that I had forgotten about, authored in a hurry, as if scared the thought would soon leave me and land somewhere else.

April 7th, 2022, 14:46

In trying to free itself, my handwriting contained itself. 
(What are) the sounds of the day when your heart is broken:

July 19th, 2022, 9:41

pain looks good on me
& my gentle, raging folds

April 25th, 2022, 17:42

I thought things like: what would happen to my thoughts? How would they travel if they were on their own? 

October 10th, 2022, 16:33

Loyalty to the moment

March 5th, 2022, 23:40

This bright little life you have
Open it up

April 4th, 2022, 11:36

I will prepare for a day of solitude 

September 23rd, 2022, 9:56

Parsley 
Cherry tomatoes
Chickpeas
Red onion 
Cucumbers
Lemon vinaigrette 
Bell pepper
Feta

There are some conversations in my notes that I can barely follow. In deciphering what’s written, I have to guess then label who has said what, though this hasn’t made the memory any less ambiguous. I tend to love that some parts have been written in bold by accident. I feel moved by the errors that trail alongside the territory of typing on one phone with another. I have edited the following exchange for the purpose of coherency, but the mistakes are proof that something happened here; evidence of human flaw in a conversation that was alive—a dialogue that was being passed from one pair of hands to the other in an attempt to understand something they couldn’t.

October 21st, 2022 3:50

F: I asked him to put a song for us
    Wait for it
J: I am so tired
F: I am with you
J: But you understand?
F: Many things
J: Like what? 
F: Zenbuuuu 　( 全部 ぜんぶ, in English, means everything. ) 
J: Everything
F: I feel you kind of don’t want me here, but at the same time you want me, right? 

I’m not sure if these lines have been correctly assigned. 

On October 3rd, 2022, 18:04, I wrote:

Museums are dead
And everybody is going back home now
A fake party is still a party

And on August 20th, 2022 at 21:01, there are two quotes.

The first is from James Baldwin.

People hold onto anger because they cannot encounter their pain. 

And the second from bell hooks. 

In order to be in love you have to embrace your loveness-ness. 

In order

to be in love

you

have

to

embrace

your loveness-ness

The first note on my phone in 2022 is something F said the day after we returned from Hakone. I didn’t know it then, but I was not the only person he took there. It was around this time that a muted war began to stir inside my stomach, telling me something was wrong. I wanted to love without expectation, to learn something from the way life offers friction, so I tried to understand the layers I was in, mine and his—all the stories I was given.

Uncertainty bears the burden of carrying every and any possibility, renditions of story that require tireless translation. I met with many adaptations of the truth, most of which were the redactions of it. To meet with the most painful of those possibilities meant to doubt love, to think you may be in loveness-ness. For a long while I think I may have been encountering this pain as if it was of my own making, as if the aches were born in my body, where my bones were built. It wasn’t until this year was almost over that I began to learn that none of it was.

When I see notes like these now, I think of all of the unknowing.

January 3rd, 2022, 13:43

I don’t know where I put the memories. 

–F 

March 4th, 2022 12:54

I have already arrived, it’s already happening

December 21st, 2022 10:56

She’s not questioning God, she’s trying to get closer to him

July 19th, 2022 9:47

They don’t know of endlessness
the ripe peach beauty of you

July 17th, 2022, 11:37

The world must have ended many times 

May 26th, 2022, 14:18

painting long…
how i knew you

a poem 

April 28th, 2022 8:03

⁨مالا نهاية endless / infinity⁩”‎‎

July 10th, 2022 14:59

I think I was missing my life. I want to live my life, please let me live it. 

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