I am discovering stages of being with a language. First, I read, and I desire to read as the honest stranger of another’s words. Then, I read as if I were the writer of those words. Later on, I read as if the writer were present in the time of writing. I read as if the time of my reading were the time of their writing. Between these acts of reading, I write. I forget my voice, remember words, and words remember their roots through the silent fragments of my speech.

Honesty is an ideal: the seed of my desire when memory has outgrown the age of flowers, a sound of blooming within sounds of sowing. In Chinese, the character for flight shares the sound of the character for waste. Honesty is this sound. Flight is in the first tone: the voice rises, then never finds a place to alight on as the lower lip sets the character free, flinging itself outwards with the pressure of the front teeth. Waste is in the fourth tone. The lips free the sound with a similar strength of the fricative, but the force of this freedom casts the character onto the ground. The character for waste depends on the timing of our perception. Seeing and using suspend one another in their relation to the same resource. The value of water abandons water at a certain stage of water’s metamorphosis through the time of its use, and the time of one’s judgement from states of thirst to drowning. Dishonesty will become honesty. Becoming has been the honesty of the dishonest. Honesty could be fullness at a slant even when nothing would be exempt from dishonesty.

An absence of honesty creates the weakness of love in my relationship to language. I have proclaimed to know myself in the furnace of either diminishment. Honesty haunts the presence of any image binding the singular to the plural. The beginning and end of my time with another’s words desires to know me through the self-knowledge of others; the chosen name and the discovered surname one rephrases oneself in relation to pronounce honesty in an unknown language.

Silence has been, for me, a fixation on the concept of an origin, the value we ascribe to origins, and the absence of origins all together. An origin is the instance of catastrophe, and I am silent like an angel of a language’s history. Each sentence marks the passage of time in my self-consciousness. A language’s history is both the etymology of a word, the shifting historical contexts of a language and its passage through other languages, as well as the history of a word’s use and disuse in any given memory of a speaker, reader, or writer, through the acquisition of the language. Acquisition is not only the acquisition of grammar, but the accumulation of feelings from speaking, reading, and writing that inform how our memories become intelligible to us in a language.