27 July 2026
The father of one of my friends is battling a terminal diagnosis and is nearing the end of his life; at the time of my writing this, it's entirely possible that he's no longer with us. Today, as I began the process of organizing and packing my things to move across the world again, I found a small folded rectangle of paper he gave me when he visited my studio a little less than a year ago as a prompt to stay in touch. One side of the paper, (the part visible as its exterior when folded, like a book cover), is decorated with a repeating pattern of uniform pale gold line-drawn isosceles triangles fit snugly together like puzzle to create an optical illusion of movement (like a mid-60s Bridget Riley screenprint). When the piece of paper is unfolded, neatly handwritten information appears in black ink in three stacked lines, each line offset to create a stair effect (ascending from left to right or descending from right to left). A perfectly symmetrical arrangement with the crease from the fold as its axis. The top line is his name, the middle line his email address, and the bottom line the website of a workshop he founded that he suggested I attend someday.