The gulf between one research project and the next is a fickle one, difficult to navigate. It consists of letting go but not completely, of allowing yourself to change shape and transform, of fixing your gaze on new details while still trying to hold on to the old ones. It is a process of forging new loves, finding new joys, while also mourning the loss of old ones. Though one might say that old projects never leave you, that there are always loose strands to settle and new layers to build on the old foundation, still the time when my thoughts were solely fixed on those loves and those joys has now passed. Conversations with the students of the past no longer occupy my mind and fill my days; they have fallen silent as I have ceased to make them talk with me, and so there is a new quiet in my mind.

So I will have to forge new loves then, but I do not yet know how or where to find their traces. Sporadically, I find a voice to follow, but the conversations still lack spark. I fail to see where the voices come from in the cacophony of noises that surrounds me, and I do not yet know how to make them make sense to me. But I am forging, for I do hope to seize the joy again – my thoughts need someone and something to occupy them. Forging requires care and time, it is the work of giving attention, of creation and attention, of being open and receptive, of agreeing to be changed by the work, complying with its demands. For the joy and the love emerge in moments of connection and understanding, they lie in words that fall into the right order and create meanings that burrow into both the past and the present. These meanings cannot become, they cannot be, without compliance to openness, for love will change you, it will not let you be the same you were.