August 12, 2023 — Ashley Falla’s “A Letter To My Father”

In fact, nature is normally silent, except for storms, hurricanes, avalanches, cascades and some exceptional telluric movements.

dead silence has always made me feel uneasy; the absence of sound or noise, no breeze swaying through leaves, no crickets chirping, no people talking, or fighting, no dogs barking, no children screaming or drunk people laughing; life has a hum to it, it’s a low vibrational buzz; the absence of sound or noise, hence, the absence of life itself, is an eerie feeling; silence does not exist in nature, something is always humming with life;

it made sense when it came to us, we were silent, we were eerie with the absence of sound or noise, it was unnatural; we needed a storm, i asked for a drizzle, just to hear the light pitter patter against my window, but instead i was confronted with a hurricane, we didn’t board up our doors, we were not prepared, the sound rushed in and flooded us

The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras //Nothing is lost in translation. Everything was always already lost, long before we arrived.

my main thing was wanting to be understood, i thought that, since you created me, you were supposed to know me better than i know myself; i was wrong; i also wanted to understand you, i wanted to know why you collected those samurai swords when you didn’t watch samurai movies, or partake in anything else having to do with samurais, it was strange and out of place, i wanted to understand why you only ever listened to old school reggae and dancehall music but had a million recordings of you doing (spot on) elvis presley impersonations; it seemed like we could have had so much in common if we ever had the chance to open up to each other

Some will object that noise is necessarily unpleasant to the ear.

i wonder what you would classify as noise, and what you would classify as unpleasant; i always assumed you thought i was unpleasant and that’s why you were distant, my cries were noise my complaints were noise and my existence was noise, and was it necessary for you, did it help you differentiate between my noise and their music

Translation is an asymptote: no matter how close we try to get, there’s always a space between the two bodies and that is the space where we live. The space where we transpose, or are transposed.

asymptote: a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance; an us; we moved in the same direction, towards the same curve, twice in life; we moved toward the same destiny once, the same life outcome but when the fork in the road came, you went right and i went left; and again we launched for that curve but we just kept missing it

i’ve heard the story of the delivery, how you left her depleted and eviscerated, half in this world and having a hard time coming up with reasons not to go to the next one, how you followed me out of the room and would not leave my side; i’ve heard of how you bought your own stethoscope to hear my newly formed heart whenever you wanted throughout the day and how you got a stopwatch and timed the car rides from the house to the hospital to find the fastest route; you were committed and excited; what happened

Ultra: spatially beyond, on the other side, indicating elsewhere. Ultra: going beyond, surpassing, transcending the limits. Ultra: an excessive or extreme degree.

my whole life had been set up for me to surpass you; to break the generational wheel and transcend from one reality to the next; and it was accomplished; one day i snuck into your room and into the back of the closet and i went through your stuff that you keep hidden away because you don’t like to look at it anymore, i found your poems, they were beautiful; this was after everyone found my composition notebook full of poems about how much i hated my life, and it was after the poems i was proud of and hung on my bedroom wall were ripped down and into pieces where she scattered them on my bedroom floor for me to find when i came home from school; i found your poems, and they were beautiful, and you didn’t do anything with them, you hid them away and became a security guard because you dropped out of middle school and not to brag but i am getting my post graduate degree in poetry; ultratranscend

Ultratranslation leads us to inevitable failure.

we were never going to win; somehow someway we were set up for failure; it never mattered how many stethoscopes you bought or how many poems i wrote; it was never going to matter that since i was eight years old i knew that can’t help falling in love by elvis presley was going to be the song i played as my first dance at my wedding because you sang that song to me all the time, it didn’t matter that you tucked me into bed at night with the i love you more no i love you times ten no i love you times 20 no i love you times infinity, none of it mattered and none of it counted because we were never going to win; it mattered to me