#p52ray

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.

There is nothing better than being consumed by another, and consumed in return. You belong to each other, and there is no force that could sever this bond. Each of you is too proud to say it aloud, but the fact is so obvious that any passerby sees you as two fused bodies—an exhibit in the Kunstkamera, perfectly fit to be called Siamese twins, were your genes not different. When you look at each other, everything beyond your focus blurs, turning into an indistinct mess—a backdrop, the scenery for staging yet another of your dramas. You raise each other to the rank of gods, build an empire where two will reign. There is nothing better than being consumed by another, and consumed in return.

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.

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.

They say I’m blind because I see nothing but you. I think it’s the exact opposite. In their search for new sensations, they pass through thousands of people, tear off a piece from each one, creating a living construction set. This Frankenstein’s monster, held together by threads of fragile bonds, cannot withstand even the faintest breath of wind. You are like a many-faceted diamond whose every turn produces a new and eerily fascinating refraction of light. You are an endless reel of film, holding within it an infinity of stories. You are a lottery in which every outcome—defeat included—is a victory. In this life, there is no emotion you couldn’t give me. My focus on you has let me see more than the rest.