I see you more than ever in the world around me, and feel you in every impulse for affection or aggression, whether emotional or sexual or intellectual. Not just when I see a woman with black hair and piercing eyes, but when tree leaves rustle a certain way, or outside a bakery, or driving in the mountains. Not sure if you can take that as a birthday present, and it certainly isn’t meant that way, since I feel it whenever creativity swells out of me. And I have not been a spectator this past year, for anything; artistic energy is flooding into every minute of my time, and the year stretched out impossibly long, gushing into a multitude of expressions and experiments. Your persona, half hope and half pleasure, still has her hand on the faucet, cranking the possibilities wide open.
(a diary entry for the photoessay "Yellow Shop")