Aesthetically, the most appropriate books to read on the streets of Berlin have the spine bearing the name: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is because he’s one of the precursors of soul-writing which is what I’m trying to spool below, so to speak. But it’s like the line: The hex of your aura stains my heart obsidianly. A line like that (the hex of your aura) might sound meaningless but in soul-writing the sense of it is elastic and Voice is all for it was all Voice inside not yet rippling the surface of the 20-by-15 inch screen in my cramped Dostoyevskian room (Berlin) where in my work on the META Pro Team I email and live chat and howl down the telephone to INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK advertisers with technical problems: billing for ads, delivery of ads, rejections for when the ads sell banned products or services and who cares? Zuckerberg does. My team-leader Yevyoo does. Nobody reading this cares though: only let me say: there’re seventy what’re called frontline agents and ten managers. So eighty colleagues who I potentially speak to and I know nobody. We communicate via Workplace, a desktop app but yeah: Who cares? Ba-ba-ba, we type and send but the reply never comes back saying: The hex of your aura stains my heart obsidianly. I was reading The House of the Dead the day when the person to who I’d later write those words, the hex of your aura stains my heart obsidianly, first appeared on screen.
Valerina Giova it said: her name.
Burnt-sienna is a very literary word for a rich-dusky-evening-red-red but in the photo her thick long hair was literally a rich-dusky-evening-red-red suffused with a burnt-sienna glow, I thought way-way later. She looked brilliant. Valerina Giova. The first if not the second time on screen her profile appeared I clicked closer to find she’s from the Italian team but now on the English (with me, good cos she’s got a face that I wanted to look at longly) and I enlarged the portrait of her bedecked in a black-n-white patterned shirt beneath a black cardigan but it was to the red bangs and the red lips and the white moon of her cheeks and her gravy-brown eyes that I said: Wow who is she? Could be a glamorous librarian in the Biblioteca Angelica. Then I clicked case ID 206190977948035599 regarding what in META nomenclature is called a banhammered Ad Account, ID (because every META asset has an ID): 779226856955034041. And talking of numbers, it was February 2025 when Valerina Giova appeared. Then as I focussed on cases and surviving, on reading Dostoyevsky and rewriting my novel, she sort of faded.
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