promise light or tomorrow

The title comes from Kelly Caldwell's posthumous debut collection, Letters to Forget. Much of her writing is dark, but some feels unexpectedly open, even hopeful. Knowing the circumstances of her death, I cannot help reading these fragments through counterfactuals: if the same words had gathered differently, could the ending have been different?

This question extends outward through the audience. Before the performance, audience members choose and record one fragment that resonates with them from a random selection drawn from Kelly's poems and my own writing. These chosen recordings are distorted, transformed, and woven into the electronics. Their order and sonic treatment are determined in the performance, so each version forms a different emotional path.

This indeterminacy echoes the private, impossible work of grieving after a suicide loss, where imagining what might have changed is inseparable from confronting the limits of control. To hear one's own voice return inside the piece is to feel both the agency of choosing the words that enter the narrative and the loss of control over where they might land.