Acknowledgements
THE REST OF THIS FILE IS FOR STRANGERS
THIS PART IS NOT
It's you.
You were not supposed to find this by accident, so you did not. I sent you the link, and your phone will remember it from now on.
Everything else on this page is written for people deciding whether to hire me. This is not.
I owe you an apology, and I have been putting it off, which is itself part of the apology.
I have been lost for a long stretch of these years. Unreliable. Ornery. Up and down in ways that had nothing to do with you and landed on you anyway. You have watched me disappear into that cat-scratched chair for hours at a stretch because my brain latched onto something and would not let go, and you learned to read which kind of quiet it was before I did. There has been a lot going on and I have been hard to live with through most of it. I knew it at the time. Knowing it did not make me any easier to live with.
You stepped up. Lately more than ever, and without being asked. When I left a good job this week with nothing lined up, you said go before I had finished explaining it.
And I do not tell you enough that you are beautiful. You are. That is not something I forgot — it is something I stopped saying out loud, which is worse.
I love you. Far more than I say, and I am going to start saying it.
Nobody is going to read this file and understand that the only reason any of it exists is you. So I put it here, on the front of the thing, where I can find it and you can too.
— A.
Everyone else sees a dedication written about you. This one is written to you, and only opens for you.
ENCLOSURE · ONE PHOTOGRAPH
Turn it over.
Everybody else gets the photograph. You get what is written on the back of it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOR
Crystal
None of this was built in an office. It was built over years in a cat-scratched pleather chair, inside a brain that does not switch off and rarely sits still, in a house she keeps standing. Every late night, every folder of half-finished ideas, every time I said give me twenty minutes and disappeared for three hours.
She has watched me take things apart for years and has never once suggested I stop. When I left a good job this week to build something that does not exist yet, she said go.
People say partner in crime. In a trestle, the load-bearing member is the one everything else rests on, and it is the one nobody photographs. That is the more accurate phrase, and she has never once asked to be thanked in public for it.
It was really built over years of studying what the problem was. I wish I had looked closer in other places sometimes.
— Allen
Not a metaphor I reached for. It is the same structure the rest of this file is named after.