So it happened. Our newspaper’s out. Issue one is already prepared. For now, small. Made overnight. How unexpected and strange gifts can turn out to be! And how they surprise no one. As if everyone had long been prepared. As if they had known.
What good to me is modesty? Another time will come for it. I write WHAT I WANT. Wanting the very main thing.
All lives because of itself. From thought to thought. Footsteps, words. Nothing is new. These manuscripts don’t cool down.
An ordinary event. A thawed spot on a windowpane—what’s there, inside? Only a small patch of landscape: what we’re thinking about. What we want to write about.

What decides? The bounds of taste? Love? Hunger?
I hate newspapers!
It wove itself: somnambulistic reeling through the city, the “great imperial circle,” flagstones of embankments… Train stations. Calls at night. Coffee. Coffee. Endless coffee. Endless Changes. Shifting metrics of physical space.
Nothing has changed. All is the same.
All is the one and only blues.

(Illustration: T. Apraksina: Hot White Night. Oil on canvas, 1988)