Mimi Kawahara
October 8, 2024
Index of Intersecting Qualia
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Your Ludmilla | 529
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Acceptance:
as capitulation, 263;
as kindness, 447;
as a last resort, 511;
as a means of maintaining the status quo, 29;
as wisdom, 528;
moment of, 367;
of blanched coral reefs, starving polar bears, unbreathable air, 56;
of civilisation as a thin, delicate crust, 338;
of your diagnosis, 91;
of my sagging breasts, 62;
radical, 29;
resolve against, 73;
stoic, 515;
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Agitation:
memorable example of: in the Mount Sinai West emergency room at 3am when in unbearable pain you watched a gorgeous man resembling a bronze statue come to deranged life, prancing around in a white sheet whining about the intolerable delay, his bald head glistening in the fluorescent light. ‘Mary Poppins doesn’t have all day to wait for J Lo,’ he told an exasperated nurse. One after another asked him to sit down and wait his turn, but this only made him more agitated. At last a doctor emerged to attend to him. ‘I’m sorry, Ms. Poppins, but you know J Lo, she’s always running late, so why don’t you come with me to wait in greater quiet and comfort?’ Instantly appeased, he followed the good doctor and left us to sit with our sorrows. You said it felt like a hallucinatory three–dimensional inversion of reality tv, live fiction, nature vivante instead of nature morte, 322;
requiring morphine, 519;
when the appointed time for our second date passed with Soho window shoppers as my premature dream of our life together died in a New York minute, only to be resurrected when you arrived breathless and proffering the out–of–print Many Subtle Channels on bended knee, then dying again six months later in Dr. Penrose’s office on Park Avenue, 31, 378;
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Agony:
of being on the outskirts of yours, 285;
of choice, 187;
of isolation, 522;
of no choice, 521;
of not writing, 61;
of parting, 99;
of writing, 60;
unending, 516;
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Ambivalence:
re your request that I help you die, 359, 417;
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Your Ludmilla | 530
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Amusement:
at Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh’s shared love of honey and middle name, 29;
at your dismissal of Hemingway’s ‘bells, balls, and bulls’, 56;
at you reading aloud Proust’s recollection of his mother doting on him and his brother: In winter when she sent us for a walk on the Champs Elysées, she used to tell Felicie to bake some big potatoes in their jackets, (emphasis yours) which we put in our fur muffs to keep our hands warm, 350;
when you, in paraprosdokian fun, told the ophthalmologist you’d like to see her again but you’d lost your glasses, 241;
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Anger:
at the indifference of the cosmos, 239, 241, 278, 500, 511;
at the stupidity of my anger, 242, 279, 391, 507, 512;
at you for having cancer, 390, 455, 506;
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Anticipation:
counting the five weeks and two days before our first kiss, 34;
of our last kiss, 515;
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Anxiety:
about your life in my hands of clay, 413;
entry in Alexander Pope’s affective index to Homer, 322;
pervasive types:
eco, 1–529;
existential, 1–529;
nighttime, 1–529;
separation, 51–529;
social (with your formidable mother), 58, 174, 502;
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Ardour:
Ada or, 29;
Aldus’ for you, who rescued him from a wet shoebox, a mewing sodden black sock (only later did you notice the white crescent moon on his chest, and later still did he swat me with his paw whenever I tried to join in your cuddles), 74;
ours, even during chemo, 399;
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Astonishment:
at how we might never have met if my dentist’s office hadn’t flooded, you hadn’t decided to replace your frayed copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler that afternoon, I’d kept my resolve to avoid bookstores until I’d shrunk the stack of novels by my bed, I hadn’t stubbed my toe while considering Rachel Cusk’s Kudos and plopped down in front of the Cs, et cetera ad infinitum, 61;
at our ardour, 99;
at your esprit, unvanquished and unyielding, throughout the full catastrophe, without fear of wind or vertigo, 527;
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Beauty:
after a summer shower, a snail shell rising in the grass like a grey cathedral, 82;
and the beast (aka you), 315;
death is the mother of, 502;
died for, 117;
of pied things, 23;
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Your Ludmilla | 531
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of shadows, 116;
of shared silence, 75;
of the traditional Japanese toilet, at the end of a long corridor in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss, dimly lit, the quiet offset by birdsong or softly falling rain, 472;
of when, pace Thucydides, you declared that you love my olive face, pink lips, pale neck, all the way down to my perfect feet – ‘with ecstatic extravagance’, 93;
of your sparkling, sui generis mind, 7;
of your wild black forest of hair, 7;
to keep oblivion at bay, 479;
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Bewilderment:
at your equanimity in the face of death despite your incandescent joie de vivre, 436;
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Charm:
of Sandra the nurse whose lilting Caribbean patter mesmerised you during her insertion of a central venous catheter in your jugular, 398;
of some quarks (and, you add, people), until they turn strange, 83;
of your reading aloud in bed with the exuberance of a small boy allowed to stay up late for a special occasion, so much of the child in you still, 245;
of your sobriquets, from ‘my ludic Mila’ to ‘the sultry queen of the sidelong glance’ to ‘my Oulipian torch’, 171;
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Confusion:
when considering Lolita, you ask whether the lust of a man for a child is inherently monstrous, 92;
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Delight:
when I texted you a photo of the sun setting on the Seine and you replied, ‘Seine–sational’, 34;
yours in Calvino’s love of New York City, as if by transitive extension his approval encompassed future residents, 107;
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Denial:
when you say you want your funeral to resemble that of Aldus’s namesake, a 15th-century bibliophile who published more first editions of classical texts than anyone before or since, whose body was laid out surrounded by books, knowing that I know you couldn’t care less what becomes of your body once you’ve left it, I shun the thought of then, preferring here and now in your still strong, still warm arms, 328;
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Despair:
action as the antidote to, 193;
a delusion of confidence in knowledge of the future, 106;
concurrent with joy, 520;
inevitable, 511;
when Dr. P recommended palliative care, 378;
when Proust’s potatoes in his muff put you in mind of Virginia Woolf’s pockets full of stones, 399;
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Determination:
of Van Gogh to capture the vibrant splendor of the Saint–Rémy cypresses on canvas, 245;
yours, to keep optimism in check and nihilism at bay, 92;
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Dread:
of a world without you, 381;
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Your Ludmilla | 532
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of condolences, 525;
of grief with the burning intensity of our love, 510;
of the next time you cry out in pain, 459, 488;
of waking from a dream in which you’re alive and discovering that you’re not, 376;
of World War III, 429;
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Enchantment:
with Proust’s Baron de Charlus’ eccentric incarnation of poetry and perversity, 93;
with your description of the honeylocust tree over our bench in Riverside Park, its branches combed forward, like Byron’s curls, 279;
yours, with John Wheeler’s participatory universe in which every observation is a new creation – ‘Borges’ pataphysics cum physics!’, 48;
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Energy:
of your blandly handsome dentist’s synthetic smile, 156;
of your electric touch, 34;
renewable yet finite, 319;
stored in a dead body, recycled by bacteria into the environment as heat and other potential forms, 402;
your dissipating, 349, 521;
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Enlightenment:
conceptual or nonconceptual, 387;
elusive in the darkness of your disintegration, 492;
ethical aspect of, 388;
persistent non–symbolic experience, 413;
your version: we’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars, 445;
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Equanimity:
my lack of, 81, 225, 490;
when Kafka lost his voice, he began communicating with notes, the last known one reading: If you have time, please water the begonias, 377;
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Fascination:
with our friend Russell, blind since adolescence, who sees perfectly in his dreams, even his wife Natalia whom he has never seen, 485;
with Robert Walser falling dead in a snowy field recreating an image of a dead man in the snow in his novel, The Tanners, 496;
yours with a wilting tulip or wet Sycamore bark or a flattened rat on 83rd Street, your gaze fixed, trance–like, head tilted in impassioned concentration, as if discerning patterns of quantum flux, 102;
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Fear:
of causing you a hideous unnatural death, 420;
of this memory overshadowing all that came before, 420;
your apparent lack of, 497;
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Gratitude:
for you, my Reader, on many a winter’s night, my steadfast, astute, irreplaceable Reader, through chemo and diarrhoea and bloody coughs and pleural effusions and pain beyond measure, all the while loving your bohemian princess with sublime sensitivity, our first and last chapter as one, 519;
for your reminder that Proust had to self–publish Swann’s Way and pay critics to speak favorably of it, 103;
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Your Ludmilla | 533
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resentment of obligation to feel, 452;
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Grief:
you say that after you’re gone, Aldus will lead me onto the right road with his long, silent look, as Rosa Luxembourg said of her cat Mimi; but I think there will be no right road; besides, Aldus would flirt with Lenin just as Mimi did, so I’m not inclined to follow his lead, 476;
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Hope:
in ‘respair’, obsolete since the 16th century, meaning recovery from despair, 420;
not the thing with feathers, but the rope by which we hang ourselves, 481;
that with these words I can wrangle you onto the page so you’ll stay with me, 399;
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Horror:
birds falling from the sky due to avian flu and intolerable heat, 187;
children’s bodies stored in ice cream trucks, blood dripping from doors emblazoned with tasty treats, 504;
despite lethal temperatures and biblical floods, global emissions still rise, 236;
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Joy:
when you sense my eyes on you and open yours, their midnight pupils illuminated by an invisible moon, beaming at me with infinite tendresse, 113;
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Laughter:
full–body, soul–swelling, mutual merriment as rapturous as lovemaking, 46;
in slaughter, 29;
pain at the heart of, 518;
you, turning up your nose at the hospital food, saying, ‘When one of us dies, I’ll move to Paris,’ 450;
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Love:
our bedtime reading, your voice my beacon and berceuse, 67, 154, 399, 482;
the reason I said yes I’ll help you die even though I felt faint at the thought, 345;
your face when I batted away the condom to protect me from chemo drugs in your semen and said I wanted nothing to separate us, 376;
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Mourning:
and melancholia, 72;
for my life, Masha says, that’s why she always wears black, 197;
my harp is tuned to, 301;
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Nausea:
crippling, 495;
induced by predatory capitalism, 47, 352, 476;
recurrent, 483, 477, 495;
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Optimism:
of the will, failing, 495;
palatable only with Emile Habibi’s prefix ‘pess’, 366;
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Pessimism:
a colossal bore, 33;
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Pleasure:
false promise of worldly, 117;
mine when you whisper ‘Mila’, hoping I’m awake but not wanting to disturb me if I dozed off while you were reading, 478;
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Your Ludmilla | 534
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of your dopey morphine smile, 523;
of your nimble transmutation of subtle feelings into shimmering turns of phrase, 44;
upon learning that ‘Ça va?’ originally concerned the quality of one’s feces, 47;
wholesome, 35;
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Rage:
against the dying of your light, 522;
at the sick inhumanity of the so–called health care system, 417;
at you for making me the designated mourner, 523;
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Realism:
‘I’ve always been in the minority,’ you say with defiant pride, upon reading Hippocrates’ conclusion that one third of patients get better on their own, one third don’t respond to treatment, and one third benefit from it, 439;
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Relief:
elusive, ephemeral, 325;
in surrender, 526;
not even in dreams, 478;
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Resistance:
to authority, 52;
to letting you go, 399, 415–527;
to mindless diversion, 76;
to sleep that deprives me of time with you, 485;
to sleep that deprives me of time with you, 485;
to the mantra of acceptance, 22;
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Revulsion:
at your foul chemo poop, an execrable mélange of slow–cooked fermented herring and horse manure, 325;
at your curry puke stinking of rancid cheese with lumpy remnants of goat splattered on the floor, 412;
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Sadness:
critique of pure, 372;
in your eyes when you told me Van Gogh gave the asylum doctor some Cypress paintings as a parting gift, which the doctor’s son used for target practice, 74;
when you say that if Aldus snacks on your corpse, I mustn’t bury him with it, like the cat who ate part of Thomas Hardy’s heart, you find this funny, but I feel your proximity to death pushing me away, 502;
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Selfishness:
mine: I’d rather lose you than my life, preferring to be a speck of self–loathing foam atop a sea of melancholy than nothing at all, 123;
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Shame:
for faltering at the crucial moment:
when you said it was time, I upped the morphine enough to send you to sleep as you held my hand in total trust, until you woke and looked at me wide–eyed, whether in an anesthetised stupor or appalled recognition of my weakness I’ll never know, only then – afraid of your reproach – did I deliver the lethal dose, failing you in the worst way, 526;
for my selfishness, 124;
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Your Ludmilla | 535
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for ordering from Amazon, 19;
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Silence:
beyond the event horizon where the black hole of entropy is taking you, 523;
not merely an absence of sound but a vital, restorative presence, 44;
of sitting with your inert body, 527;
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Sorrow:
Aldus kneading your unresponsive hand with desperation, 523;
I think of Roland Barthes writing after his mother’s death, ‘From now on, I am my own mother’, but can find no words or other solace for your mother, bowed and broken, 526;
my chest a chasm of, 527;
the supreme tool of self–knowledge; 499;
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Tenderness:
kissing your clammy forehead and dry lips as cold air seeped through the windowpanes and flurries fell from the winter white sky you’ll never see again, 528;
your palms cupping my face as my tears fell, you consoling me for your cancer, 52;
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Terror:
let everything happen to you, beauty and, 401;
of facing the world without you, 397, 511, 524;
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Torment:
of watching you wither away (unlike the state, you observed, your wit intact), 486;
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Uncertainty:
as to whether you’ll take another breath after an exhale and a long stillness, 524;
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, 59;
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Vulnerability:
beneath your joke that to cure you we needed a pataphysician, 63;
vertiginous, 523;
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Weariness:
of having to bear up because I’m the well one, 339, 408, 470;
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Wonder:
at how you mended my heart even as you left it in tatters, 453;
speechless unknowing and, 87;
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Yearning:
for Aldus to swat me away so he can have you all to himself, 527;
for when the world, a vast open book, beckoned us in an unutterable language, 528;
for you to read to me on this winter night, 526;
to start our story again, 529;
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Mimi Kawahara is a Jewish Japanese American writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Washington Square Review, Pleiades, ‘The Experiment Will Not Be Bound: An Experimental Anthology of American Writing’ and elsewhere. ‘Index of intersecting qualia’ is one of a linked series of forms for a forthcoming collection.
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