My dear defunct mother, I have been looking at people in the street again. I strip them in my mind — no words, no explanations, only what they do with their hands and their eyes and their bodies when they think nobody is watching. It is the only way I can bear them. And next to them — that dog walking nowhere, this plant smiling to my water, that child playing yesterday with sand— beings that do not know how to be otherwise than what they are. These are the ones that break my heart open. The others — the ones who rehearse, who promise and forget, who perform the feelings they have read about — these machines only make me want to work. Some days, quietly sad, other days, in a rage I can only spend at my drawings, my sounds, my automata. I build something from all of it, climb inside it and find, every time, that what I made is truer to me than what I saw. I still look at humans without their clothes because I want to believe in them, mother. That is the only reason any of it hurts as much as it does. My pieces do not represent me. I represent them, and I forgot what you told me about the possible costs of that.