Over dinner, Kyla talks about aphantasia, or the inability to form mental images. Her partner has this—he cannot create images in his head of objects, faces, landscapes. Kyla herself is a dyslexic. The rain hits the windows as we speak, our voices echoing in the softness of the light, the windows frosty and foggy.

***

Aphantasia—the inability to create a world inside your head. Forced to look outward, does one become more creative? Do you look for outside stimuli, to populate your quiet mind?

***

We are all here to do an artist’s residency, but we are secretive and surreptitious about sharing work. Instead we talk about the purpose of art over glasses of prosecco in the Study Room. Kelly talks about art as a privilege, a luxury, while I compare it to a necessity, something I would do even if I had both hands tied behind my back. But we both spend our days locked in front of a computer screen, or in Kelly’s case, out freezing in the fernery, thinking about gesture and facial expressions. B— texts me in the middle of my night: I miss you. The time difference means we only speak a few minutes a day.

I’m not used to B— being sweet, so when he is, I constantly worry that I’ve done something wrong. True story: for the first year of our relationship, every time he said I love you, I asked: Is everything okay?

I used to be afraid to look directly at the people I loved, for fear I would use it up—as if there was only so much joy in the world, and I had to ration it. This is not rational, but I feel it in my bones—the finite quality of love, the way it could all be gone in a flash.

Aphantasia—I can picture his face, sort of, but when I imagine him speaking to me, it dissolves into nothing. When I try to hear his voice in my head, everything goes blank.

***

The heater in the dining room is positioned so that only one half of my body gets warm, and my right hand is always freezing, no matter what I do. I buy fingerless gloves, but find I can’t type with them on; they’re too bulky. I play my music on low, so as to not disturb the other residents, but can’t help but blast Chance the Rapper at eleven in the morning, dancing around in my seat.

Just be yourself, and stop worrying if they like you, B— texts when I express that I’m worried the other women don’t like me. He’s sensible to a fault, and always gives good advice. We’re moving in together when I get back, and I imagine it—having this incredible resource of sensibility at my disposal all the time, tempering my manic anxiety. Of course, he’s anxious too, in his own way, and I do my fair share of comforting him. In this way, we are a pair.

***

Aphantasia—unable to make mental images, the sufferer turns to the physical world, to the five senses, to find sensory input. Are their sensory lives more sensuous than our own? Do they experience the five senses more vividly than the general population, without the distraction of mental imagery? What happens in their brains? Is it quiet?

***

You make me think about the future, B— says to me over Zoom, a few weeks before I leave for Scotland. This is unusual, because he is very much a right now kind of person, unable to make plans that span more than a day or so in advance. This irks my obsessive scheduling brain to no end. I am a planner, a plotter, a designer, and I need to know where I’ll be at every single minute of every single day, even if it’s just typing away at my laptop. B— doesn’t think this way at all, he’s much more interested in seeing where the day takes him.

But in those moments when I realize he’s given the future some thought, I am touched. Our lives have braided together. We’ve become a unit of measurement, an empty set, a painted symbol that denotes meaning. We’re us.

***

It rains for days and days, and although I don’t particularly want to go outside, I feel strange being cooped up here, too, with nowhere to go. The dining room where I work is dark during the days, the heavy wood paneling absorbing light.

I sit with my leg on the heater, waiting for the smell of burning metal and flesh to alert me that it’s time to move. Aphantasia—does it affect all of us at some point in our lives, the way we are unable to imagine a future that we want so badly, and yet cannot grasp? I want everything to work out, and still I can’t imagine the good, only catastrophize.

***

I don’t want to worry—will we be able to live together? Will we kill and eat each other in a horrible murder suicide the likes of which haven’t been seen since Sid and Nancy? These thoughts, as I talk to the lovely women in this residency, plague me. When I get back, it’ll be a mad dash to the holidays, and then we’ll be looking for apartments.

***

My brain is not quiet. In the Study Room with the other women, I describe the way my mind is always churning, always kicking up the dust. I don’t really relax, I say. I wonder aloud if I have aphantasia, but the murky images that my brain produces prove that I do not. I’ve never been a good visual image producer, however—I tend to think in words, not pictures, which makes sense, given my chosen vocation.

Dyslexia, I learn, can appear in many different forms, and can be mitigated by changing fonts, the color of the letters on the page, or by wearing special glasses. It has something to do with the way signals from the eye move to the brain in many cases, but everyone is unique. I can’t picture myself as a dyslexic—I take so much of reading and writing for granted. I am so used to looking at a block of text and instantly knowing its meaning.

I wish I could look at the future this same way, but it’s blurry, unsure. I can’t read the coffee grinds in the bottom of my cup. I’m not a mystic, and I don’t know how to predict anything. All I can do is hope for the best.

***

It’ll all be alright, he tells me now, soothing me with a text message. In Nashville earlier this year, he told me he couldn’t be the sole source of comfort for my anxiety. It’s too much responsibility, he said, and I kicked the railing of the balcony I was standing on. We were on the phone, although he was only an hour away by car. I can’t be everything to you.

It’s going to work out, he promises. Still, we have a contingency plan—a two bedroom apartment, so we can have space from each other, in case things don't go as expected. I hate being so far from him, in Scotland, but he doesn’t feel distant. In this way, through text messages and phone calls, we are as close as lovers, his voice through the phone line breathless and near.

I need to stop being afraid. But I can’t see it—the future hazy and dim. In the mornings, over toast and coffee, I imagine him next to me at the table. I can’t bring his face to my mind. I can’t picture anything.

***

Hyperphantasia, Kyla tells us, is the opposite condition. I wonder, with such a vivid mental life, would anyone ever leave the house? Want to interact with other people? I get so tired of my own mind, its anxieties, that I seek out other people for a respite. But for those who can conjure vibrant mental images, what’s the point of the outside world? Who would look outwards, when you can see the future before your very eyes?

***

Everything is temporary. Anxiety, when it comes, will not last forever. I tell myself this as I look forward—and look forward to sleeping next to the person I love for the rest of the foreseeable future. The sun sets at four-thirty in Scotland, and I watch the horizon grow deeper and deeper blue, the streaky sky calming me like a cup of warm tea.

B—’s latest message comes when I’m asleep, the six hour time difference separating us as usual:

All I can think about is you waking up to the prettiest orange glow on that castle’s walls and me in that very same second looking out my window at all the stars in the night sky.

And I know that the future, whenever it comes, will be okay. It has to be.

Joanna Acevedo is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021), List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022), and Outtakes (WTAW Press, forthcoming 2023). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Litro USA, Hobart, and The Adroit Journal. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry and The Masters Review and a member of the Review Team at Gasher Journal, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2022 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing and interviewing skills for both nonprofits and corporations, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.