You wrote about imprints and immediate objects in your goodbye letter to me. I am writing the first draft of this on January 8th. Currently, when I think of immediate objects, I think of the thick black suitcase that sat between us on your walk to the train station, it looked heavy, like a doorstop, like an anvil. It was something immovable that was being taken away. It is an immediate object: something present and repeatedly referred to with action. In contrast, the imprint is the present and the repeatedly felt, like the skin cells, dog ears, and ink that is forever on my Schuyler anthology. An imprint (or dare I say a stain) is always something given I think, even if a bronze bust is stolen from a museum or a big house that has lights on the outside, then there is a new space that is given (alongside the grazed paint and the boot marks). I gave you this book, you gave me its 2nd, fuller, reading. Most of our imprints are less blatant than written notes. I still do your little dance (arms up at the side, hips swinging in opposite directions) to ironically celebrate something, and my Asda “regulars” are full of things you’d used to eat. Most of these things are completely unrecognisable to the untrained eye, I’m absolutely certain that I could run out a quick excuse about the sylvanian stickers on the inside of the bookshelf to any future partner looking to act a bit green. They are only you to me - I feel like the last person in the world able to speak a forgotten language.

You write all your notes on a slant. I can’t work out why, it is never for space reasons. The slight tilting of the book when you go to jot something is my current theory, but I like the idea of these notes dripping off the poems, tied to an elusive and changing gravity source. You are also far less discerning with pens than I would have guessed. There are instances where the opposite page is stained with undried ink from a page closure, you use a horrid red pen at some points that really grates on the eye, for the occasional ransacked poem, you even have used two colours, as if the continuity of the reading isn’t important, “these are more thoughts, I have had them when I have had them”.

It felt right to make this. Why can’t your birthday be in June? I would be bigger than you then. I don’t know whether I won’t be able to give this to you until September, or some other date that exchanging a thoughtful gift with an ex would be seen as acceptable. I don’t even want to be making you a birthday gift, I just want me to make it and you to have it, not physically, but have the impression, have the record of your blushed on my skin. I am making this out of love of course, a love closer to the one you showed me in your letter. The process was a question of imprint, seeing which of these marks you have made on the book are ones that resonate with the ones you have made on me, the ones I can see at least. I have then used these marks to make something new, construct new writings of me in a future state. I am referring constantly in my daily life to the idea of building myself and my life back up bigger, but I will be doing it with pieces marked by you.