Invention was your solitude and twin, wasn’t it, Miss Nin? The calculated manner in which you spread secret pages, like silk violet capes or fringed shawls, promising an air of mystery and desire. You enabled the cause of symmetry, so as to confess. Why couldn’t a woman be a fabulous opera fulfilled nightly through shadow-call and gilded tenor? Why couldn’t many hands attend fruitfully to matters of flight and garden envy? Paradise, for you, was always one finite entry away, wasn’t it? A diarist’s mad dash and hush to engorge, inflame, and export the wilds of a soul which outgrew borders and margins, spills of ink immigrating to distances recalled. You warmed yourself in reveries and blood-let, Miss Nin, while attempting to detonate and explode your neuroses, going so far as to leave us detailed maps of your psyche’s labyrinths. Yet, like a cartographer with an interiority complex, your maps led seekers to regions well beyond you. Territories, unmarked, leading us back to ourselves. And, I, a spelunker with a hard-on for sphinxes, used your maps to my own advantage—to reveal and baffle, to veil and dwell—because you see, Miss Nin, your bones bridged me to mine, as mine will to another, and so on and so forth, an underground network of interconnected bridges and tunnels, where lusting pilgrims come to know the tenderest breaking of dawn to light.