Ray.

I want you to understand how your silence feels. Imagine that humanity has forgotten your language. Now you’re a builder of the Tower of Babel. When someone opens their mouth, all you catch is the faint tapping of the tongue — the ticking of a clock that grates on your nerves. They have become interference, background noise whose nature you’ll never care to examine. Your thoughts beat ceaselessly against the walls of your skull with no right to release. Your only salvation from madness is the one who, by some happy chance, hasn’t lost the ability to understand you. If he falls silent, the universe could collapse at any moment. I want you to understand how your silence feels.

fuck off, you piece of trash.

Not a second goes by that I don’t think of you. You sank your teeth into my packed, minute-by-minute schedule, chewed it up, and spat it out. The lines on the scraps of paper, humiliated and insulted, slid off them and fled. They became closing credits with no hope of being restored. Now, when I sit down to work, your image looms ominously over me, like an overseer. Wherever I go and whatever I do, thoughts of you keep returning in different forms. It’s as if you’d been stitched onto me, and I feel I can’t reach the seam. Not a second goes by that I don’t think of you.

Are you telling me to find a replacement for you? Don’t talk such stupid shit. I know I’ll never be able to love another person again. You hold a special place in my mind—this apartment was built to fit your measurements and needs, and no one else will fit in there; they’ll just turn into furniture, waiting for their true owner. I’ll carry you through my whole life, past millions of faces. And no matter how hard I try to piece together a double of you from all that diversity, I won’t succeed. You’re a unique combination, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.