Excerpt from T Fleischmann’s 2019 autobiographical essay Time is the thing a body moves through

“Staying for a bit on Benjy’s porch (where we fell in love, Jackson and I keep saying) means that Benjy and I get to play around with our art some more. He returns one afternoon with new flowers from the greenhouse where Sterling used to work, and I arrange them into letters, one at a time, arranging and rearranging the little plastic planters while Benjy snaps overhead photos from the roof. The series of photos spells out my £Xx/T. It’s a quick process, just an afternoon between Benjy’s fleeting thought—these would make pretty letters—and the photographs. If my own exit means something new is growing, that seems pretty optimistic, especially if the new thing growing is all flowers and stalks and the suggestion of spring turning into summer. Like maybe if the climate change gets us before we have a chance to totally scorch the earth, other things will still get to live and evolve here, the water planet of the octopus people and their friends, the wise dolphins. We imagine the series of photographs as an answer to the question, “Is the rectum a grave?”—a sex joke about life, to suggest going elsewhere.

Jokes really are most of it, for Benjy and me. Our conversations are filled with laughing, as is most of our time working on the art. A good laugh is most of what it takes for us to find meaning, in the way that two people can always make their own meanings. A favorite joke lately is the idea that the art is going to make us rich, that we'll finally be wealthy, wealthy 112 T Fleischmann artists, instead of tax dodgers, underemployed in our temporary employment. “Hello, Mr. Moma? Yes, you can have these photos for thirty million dollars,” I say. “For you, Mrs. The Guggenheim,” Benjy answers, “the sculpture will cost double that.’”