In this hour we have left, there is no difference between closing and opening my eyes. Someplace else, somewhere I can’t see, you have gathered with all of the light and you prepare the morning. But if I have one last night, I don’t want to think about dawn. So –
If I close my eyes, I’m there again.
Fresh-scented evening around us, kind light of the moon. We lean on the wall, smoking a cigarette, and the stages of the night gently ooze away. Hours of excitement, sleep-deprived, enjoying another kind of clarity, one we would have to recant in the morning. It’s the first time for you – I stopped counting.
Did you know how young you were, what that meant? You couldn’t have possibly known.
I sit on the outside of time and turn to this enclosed hour. I feel an indescribable tenderness for the boy I was, still in the dark on so many important things. That terror inside of me – the shirt I wanted to wear to prove to myself and everyone that I still belonged there tighter than I thought, compressing my chest. Horribly afraid that you’d see, in that softness of my skin, one of your elder brothers, your father. It was the first time you took my hand, electrifying like a crime.
I would like to ask you what you see, when you look back. Is there someone else at my place? If you think about that city, do you remember me, or was I always a stand-in for someone else that didn’t come, someone of your damned generation, or anyone else that wasn’t you? Was I always going to be late to you?
I don’t remember where we went to, afterwards. If I bought the beers or you did, if they asked about ID. If you walked in the store with me. But we must’ve gone dancing at some point, because I remember watching you, envying how easily the music entered your body, how you channelled it out. Then morning came and it found us on the shore – you spilled on the sand, sunrays multiplying in the water. There was no need to say that that would be the last time for a long while. It was the beginning, or maybe the end, and I was enjoying how unnecessary talking felt. But, when you didn’t attempt anything, I was still the one to promise. Still bound to my years, my scepticism.
Were you really looking for me, that night? Have you found who you really loved, after the eclipse? Do you dance and rejoice in your supreme being, or have you failed at that? Do you miss me? Are you still in there, are you still you?
All of that city held the taste of sand for years – of sunscreen, of plastic. Back when nights meant something, I lived through entire years where I couldn’t drive past it without crying. But this was later, and there was a little consolation in being able, whatever the time, to tell myself that it had gone well, in the end. In the later years, after we moved, if I found myself on that road I would turn towards the inland, away from the shore. I had found out that some things are better left unturned, unrevisited. As I aged, the sadness of my twenty-five years took its residence in that city, then the anger of twenty-six years old me who didn’t find you, the confusion of my twenty-seven and twenty-eight, before I said yes. All of the jealousy, all of my fondness, the fear of showing it. But also your first absence, then your repetitions, that pride of yours that kept us apart for years. None of my friends believed in the revelation and we kept living our lives as if Dora hadn’t spoken. I kept coming back to that city, walking along streets brimming with fourteen years old experiencing the first summer of their lives and the world that was promised to them. Forever out of place amongst them, my eyes grew darker as my friends moved into other cities, where living was easier, analog was becoming a psychological necessity and growing up with children felt safer. I didn’t understand why they felt this need to protect them by isolation until you began inviting me to the outings of your brigade and I began seeing what nightmare you called future. This was after, too.
When you let me find you again I discovered you had grown older and different things mattered to you. We both weren’t alone – my friends, your friends, impossible to integrate. It was still early, the revelation was on everyone’s tongue and we were all trying to play our game, trying to understand what the other was up to without letting curiosity, the first sign of weakness, of fear, transpire. Your people already showcased that indifference to the world that would become so pungent, so fucking irritating as we all grew up – you were supposed to be nineteen, for God’s sake – and you weren’t unaffected by them. I never figured out if they had influenced you in those years I didn’t see you, or if you already were a dreamer when I first met you. That night, that first holy night, we were both playing another game, and we both didn’t want to ruin it with politics, with figuring out the edges of our dreams.
I still think about that night, the second one (I think about it all). After all these years, after all that’s happened to the world, I still don’t know why you took my hand. If you had just become tired of hiding, or if you knew already that it would slip into mine like water. That night, for the first and last time, I didn’t question if it had a right to fit there so easily. You were nineteen, you had been promised eternity and infinite communion, and life was a delicate garden for you. I was twenty-seven and the world had become cold like a beach when the sun turns away.
Then time moved pretty fast. I don’t hold memories of those interstitial spaces either – the months of dating, the start of the war. We became citizens of a nation at war, we got engaged and nothing changed substantially. I remember the last night of the world. I don’t have anything left in the dark but remembering. I didn’t think you could have hurt me anymore, I thought myself impenetrable to your words. But the world was ending and that made everything cut deeper. At some point, as I was screaming at you, I realized that would be the last time, that these were going to be the words I was going to leave you with. And once again I renounced action. I had grown tired, my love, so tired. The TV kept screaming, a single white light in the dark blue of our living room, and our phones were blowing up with goodbyes and memories and regrets. I thought, if this is the end, let it be. I always felt so fragile when trying to pick up your hand. You didn’t sleep that night and you didn’t speak to me anymore. You had decided that there was nothing left to say, too.
This is of course not the story I told myself all my life. I had my doubts, but I always believed I loved you. But your absence has created a loop in time, and now I cannot look back without becoming so painfully aware of how you had never quite been completely there, waiting for the rupture, and look, you’ve won. The rest of us condemned to a night without sleep, until the arrival of what you call the empire of light and I call annihilation. It is the last night of the world and I still can’t let go of my resentment. I should be able to forgive you, and not for anyone else’s sake but myself. I won’t get a redo, I won’t get to be part of what you have planned for the rest of time. But I refuse reconciliation, any happy ending. I refuse to become part of your horde.
I wish I could tell you that I still loved you like the first time. I wish love still meant the same thing for us. My version of love looked like becoming unable to love you because you would’ve become so thoroughly part of myself, of my blood, that I couldn’t have uttered a predicament where me would have been different than you. I thought that, at some point, to call you with your name would have meant ripping you off my skin. Some version of this has become true to both of us. How much time has it been? How many centuries since you left? I had a time in the light when I couldn’t see myself separated from you, even in the bad days, and now I have become enmeshed with your shadow in this world of pearl you have left behind.
I wish I could know what you are thinking. All of you. How much the nature of your thought has changed. I have become curious too – not about your desires, but about what you mean now. Does it even make sense to say that I loved you, when you were always on your way to leaving me, to joining yourself with the cosmos?
We fought so hard and so quickly. It became part of our life and we thought it normal. It was never about what you believed in and I didn’t. You wanted to lead by example, show me how much fuller a life with faith would be. But something in me provoked you and something in you disturbed me, something about the way you slipped into my silences, how I forced you to the ground. I’m sure it wasn’t just the years, because in the grand scheme of time, eight years aren’t much. You must see that now. Now, in this after, I ask myself, if I could go back – invested with a power opposite to yours, spiteful to your light – would I try to stop myself from falling in love with you? Would I tell myself that the world ends and it does so without you, because all of those stories you believed in turned out to be a promise, and there is no escaping your truth now? But if it was always going to end up like this, isn’t it better to have loved you, to have fought with you? To have known the peaks and depressions of this love, which after all made up a life, the one we shared?
I wish I could forgive you –
Maybe we had to come to terms with too many things to love each other. Sometime in the years of your life I don’t know anything about you, too, must’ve become convinced that the kind of love that liquifies blood wasn’t something that you could achieve. We settled for the next best thing, passion, flickering intensity, this unspoken promise, sometimes uttered quietly, that we’d always be there for each other. Maybe we both misunderstood our differences as a chance to grow more complete, instead of the markings of two different planetary systems. Maybe we slipped too easily into a ready-made life – the path that took me out of my studies into a job I hated but could sustain us, while you grew your power, your influence, as your brigade became bigger ad bigger. Maybe I should have you let go from the start. Standing at my side corrupted you, it made you grow old before your time. In a few years with me you found a life, too, hints of a career, and suddenly there wasn’t enough time to think about what it all meant. Maybe it was just me. The first signs of your faith breaking had started to show, and I was proud of you, but you still had your brigade. I didn’t have anyone but you.
But that’s not all. There was some comfort in that life, too. We grew into schedules, appointments, check-ups, touch-ins, get togethers. We had a life outside of our hours and a secret, truer one inside, where we laid on bed for ours and you touched the foreboding of yourself on my body, as I touched my demise on yours.
The city became too much. Our families were pushing us in the same direction, away from each other. Directing it against the same target, we found our how strong our anger was. We scorched most of the earth around us, told us there was nothing left to stay for, and left. I had a woman for whom I still meant something and you had a sister hidden where no relative of yours could find you two, had you decided to go back. We didn’t tell each other this until much later, and we were both proud of the other for having at least considered a second plan, a way out.
For a while, after the move, we knew some kind of harmony. We believed we could actually work together because we were exhausted, overworked, all the time. But also because you had lost your friends and, with them, contact with your dreamworld. I watched you adjust very naturally into a life of duty and work. But once I still saw you weep when someone on the TV was being interview and he looked like you, just a few years before, as he tried so hard to remind the world of that first encounter, when we became aware that another way of being could be possible, just over the horizon. How quickly we forgot, how quickly you did, too. I began to think of us as appendixes of the same, lethargic body. We took all the precautions, bought tons of condoms, made sex plastic, so that there would be no incidents, no chances. I needed you to be mine, mine only. I still don’t know what you wanted out of me. I waited until you wouldn’t be ashamed anymore of the years that separated us, but you never could. I never lost the pungent feeling that you were ashamed not for yourself, but for what it said about me.
I thought that your new-found loneliness would bring us together. That you were finally going to grow up, accept that there was not going to be any sudden release, that we’d always be slaves to our finiteness. That it was just the two of us, no one else, no gods, no prophets. Just you as someone to come back home to, a place where to land, watching something together during dinner, falling asleep as soon as you held me. One time, as I saw you talking to some friends of mine at someone’s birthday party and laughing with them as if they were yours, too, I realized that, despite it all, you and I had made a home. We decorated our house with stupid recurrences that only the two of us would remember, discovered a new language to talk each other outside of that of love or spite, the pleasure of quiet evenings. Once, just after the move, cardboard piles in the corners, you sat at the computer, looking so focused, and I cut an apple and fed its pieces to you, one after the other. You never looked at me, you trusted me with this. I felt each other turning into limbs of the same body and stopped fearing you'd bite me. I would have kept going, if you did. Later that evening, in bed, I told you that I felt like very action of mine died in my hands. Doing the dishes, keep my ties in order, your heels compiled against the wall – watching television in the evenings with my arm around your shoulders, keeping each other close in front of others at friends’ houses. You listened and didn’t say anything. I thought you knew there was nothing left to say, and was grateful for it, but maybe you were speaking to me through your mind, maybe you still believed we could talk like you and your friends swore you could.
There was comfort, some kind of love, in the way we leaned on each other as we walked home, having agreed on not taking a cab without a word (we knew telepathy too, my love). I was leaving those thirties you had just entered – that brief window of time where lying about how we met each other became lighter. You would walk with your heels in your hands, I carried my blazer over on my shoulder, my tie undone. It was pleasant to be seen like this, to imagine ourselves observed while playing Fellini at the end of the world. I thought it would always be enough for both of us, that you would also be content with it.
You have to remind yourselves that there was love, between us. I could never forgive you if you forgot.
But being separated from your friends changed you. Maybe it was also paying taxes against your childish anarchism and regular Thursday dinners. Maybe it was my friends, those ones we made together, who never learned to see us as separate beings. After all, love lost meaning and the maintenance of life became our main preoccupation. Gradually, the world turned from our home into our enemy. I thought you were at my side. At some point, so much earlier than I thought it’d happen, I stopped living with the levity of youth and I found myself battered and tired, in need of a home, and I wanted you to be that place. We both became defensive, tired of paying for someone else's wars, for countries that were not inside of what we insisted in calling love. Tired of being disappointed by the world, of having promises broken. Tired of waiting. You turned inwards and showed the worst of you: how selfish you could be, how resistant to love, to change. It was not the woman you wanted to be and not the woman I loved, but the one that I could be fine with being loved by. You turned thirty and you suddenly became human, nervous, disappointed, afraid. Your moral superiority was gone and I was happy to see that your brigade hadn't gotten to you completely. They tried to rein you in and you reacted with such violence that they just let you be. I'm sure they knew already how the world would turn. But you were separated from them, suddenly alone, for the first time. You had lived all of your life inside a mindhive and you didn't know what to do of yourself without other's voices mixing with yours. You clung to me and I let you. I despised them for leaving you to me, I despised this version of you, I despised myself for not wanting you to go back. We had a good year, and then the spheres started spinning into place and the eclipse began and you choose to keep the child.
I remember the night I found you on the floor, all that blood blooming out of you. How dark it was, as if had come from your deepest inside, as if longed to go back. You threatened me with the same knife you used. Something – finally – broke inside of me. It took me so long to understand that it hurt so much to see I had failed to protect you against the harshness of the world. I knew that you had grown tired of waiting and wanted to go before everyone else. That night the world became real to me. l. I realized that you really believed in that future, that it was a matter of life to you. So I turned away and went to bed. I left you there, in the bathroom, sighing. When I woke up in the morning, I got up to make coffee, brought you a cup and left it on the nightstand. Sometime in the night you bandaged your wounds and crawled back to bed. Your hair was still wet. I know you never forgave me for that. Even in the years of cruelty, we never spoke of those days again.
I was born weak, my love. I had only one moment of greatness, of conviction, in me, and I spent it on that night that I took you for a ride on my sad scooter, sand still on our skin, and like a ‘70s movie miracle, no one was around. I had spent the whole evening trying to convince you. You were afraid of the speed, of leaving control up to me. You were right; we didn’t know each other. On the other side of that fear was I, afraid of dawn, the nightingale’s song. I thought that, if you hadn’t been attached to my skin, isolated from the ground, you would’ve left me forever. I see that boy with his ridiculous fake leather jacket on naked skin, you holding me tighter as I went faster, and that person is as impenetrable to me as you are now. All that he had was lost with time, cleared away by the light of the afternoon. Maybe we never really were the same person, or growing up feels like this, a sort of extinction. I bought you an ice-cream to give you time to think about it. Eventually, as it melted in your hands while you kissed me, you said yes. I can still see your body next, upon mine, and I can almost remember its warmth – the power it held over me, the desire I had to keep you close, to open your ribs without making you cry and lay down there – rest. Soon there will be nothing but light, no crevice for darkness to take refuge in, and your brigade will have won its absolute victory. I cannot hold much anymore, but this – your arms and your ribs holding me inside of a place outside of time – this I still have, this you cannot take away.
Then you walk way, throwing the cone to the ground. All my life I was running after you and now you’ve just gone ahead, somewhere I cannot reach.
Soon after that morning when I made you coffee and you refused to let me touch you, you announced that you were carrying a baby. It was impossible, so sudden. We hadn’t changed anything, didn’t let our guard down. I didn’t believe you. The therapist said to give you a little time – that you might’ve attempted suicide because you had lost a child, one you didn’t tell me about, and that by confronting you, by pulling you out of your fantasy, I would’ve put you in danger. I didn’t believe him either, but it was comforting to pretend to. Then a shape grew inside of you, technology proved you right, and in a few months I could see it with my eyes. The truth is, I had become bitter because all those years at your side I prayed to be able to see the world like you did, to be able to have faith like your people, and was not blessed. You You had become abrasive because your dream had become a revenge on me and all the people that had tried to separate you from the greatest source of happiness of your life, a world where there would not be any boundaries anymore. The child changed everything, it gave substance to your dreams, nourishment.
I thought that the baby might help you focus on us again, but it became your greatest lesson, your last trial. I needed for it to bring us closer. That was the only kind of miracle I could believe in. But it reminded you of the girl you had been, of the world that you had left behind. As the baby began sucking the life out of you, you became more sunny. One night, smiling so hard that you eyes closed completely, you told me that you had started talking with your friends again. The old brigade, you specified. The phone lines had been closed, the war had begun requiring bigger sacrifices of all of us. In that moment I remembered you sitting in the dark for hours, occasionally tilting your head to the side. That evening I went to bed without dinner and I couldn’t sleep, I just stared at the wall as I let the cold eat away at my feet.
I really thought we had a deal. I thought we were together in this, in this fuckup of a life, that we were both terribly afraid. That we both knew that, had we let go of each others’ hands, they would have turned to be the only thing keeping us together – not just us, but you and me. That, in letting to, the stream of life, having turned us into a sick version of what we each dreamed, would have hurled outside of that room whose corners we knew perfectly, where the light in the morning hits the surfaces in a way we are familiar with. In a rare moment of honesty, before the baby, when I felt like I was talking to you and you only, we found out that we had both accepted that, without the fear of not having enough to build a life again, one couldn’t go back. We wished to hold hands and walk backwards to that sea, that kinder piano we had heard that morning on the beach, and we both found our peace knowing that that wasn’t in the cards for us.
In these last years we had found an unexpected gift in the practice of our cruelty, almost absolute honesty. You told me of all the times you tried to die and I told you that I had given up on dreaming of a life where I wouldn’t have to justify my petit-bourgeois smallness in front of you. We sat at tables prepared for us, the waiters adjusting your chair so that the belly wouldn’t suffer, and I would tell you, smoking indoors, that maybe I should have found someone else to love, both at twenty-five and twenty-seven, that I should have never gone back for you. I told you of this other, impossible life with another woman, equally happy, equally close to the wound, as doomed as I was then, telling you it all over dinner. People smiled at us, they thought us on a date. Once you suggested that, in that other timeline where you didn’t take my hand that second time, we would’ve spared ourselves, us singularly, from the people we had become. I took it to heart and, with sudden passion, added that then we would’ve remained a beautiful memory, uncorrupted, the comparison towards which we would have tended all of our lives. We couldn’t admit it then, because it would have ruined our game of cruelty, the only thing making the reality of how much we needed each other bearable, that we were doomed from the start, that from that night where I marked you with a kiss I condemned the both of us to become intertwined with each other, to become a part of what we would turn out to be, whatever happened – in absence or presence, in love or spite or quiet resentment. Because even if we had grown old with someone else, you would have stayed with me and I with you. You were always going to be ripped away from me during the rapture. Since that first night I was never going to be whole again.
We weren’t young anymore, but we weren’t that old. We had sheltered some version of love that only the two of us could understand. I was feeling my body starting to betray me and I was enticed by the thought of some day, without even noticing, slipping into another kind of existence, where everyday would become an exercise of the body. I found myself looking forward to that kind of athletic, physical pleasure. I thought life would’ve slowed down, gotten easier.
But you had your dream again, and I had nothing. As the child grew inside of you, you became interested in people again. I caught you talking at randoes at parties, inviting unfriendly acquaintances over for dinner. I played the part of the misanthrope for you, the truth was that I was so tired, so afraid that you would try to lose me again, leave with the baby. I just wanted for the two of us to have dinners and go to sleep together every night. But now we weren’t alone anymore. I had renounced changing the world, you picked up the project of salvation again. Our cosmos was a common project, the only place we both wanted to terraform. We talked about it strongly in front of our friends – all those stories of brutalism, of unyielding humanity. Just outside of our borders, the war was showing us what it also means to be human again. I was inspired by you. I genuinely was. I thought maybe something could change. I took up cases pro bono, you started meditating again. It would become clear that we believed in the same core, but we would take it to different lengths. We had learned to focus on what we shared, rather than what divided us, and we began suspecting that this was the reason we hold on for as long as we did. Maybe that wasn’t love either, but some kind of fondness, of tenderness for each other, as we told each other stories like prehistoric men in front of the fire, to take courage.
But again, slowly, I became your enemy. All that I represented to you - older generations, the ancient world that refuses to die, the monsters that arise from this stubbornness. You dreamed of a world where life wasn’t something to pay for, something that ends, a world where there would be no unnecessary secret, no pain, no evil anymore. Where your pain could finally become mine, too. A world where I would have never been able to walk away from you, bleeding on the bathroom carpet. Where my heart could be as open as yours had always been. I wanted the same, but not with anyone. You have no idea how hard I fought against myself to let you. I could have never allowed the world.
In the last night of the world we argued about the child. It was too late to discuss normal things – what beliefs to impart, how much dreaming would be allowed, which frequentations. Suddenly your world had become real. The TV had announced the eclipse and you wanted to take the baby with you. I got on my knees for the first time in twenty years and I asked you to leave it with me, to give me a chance, to give it a chance to decide for itself if it wanted to go with you into the light. I wanted to borrow some time, some two decades, whatever I could scrape to spend time with it and convince myself that it had been all worth, after all. I tried to appeal to your darkest fears, the ones only I knew. But you had made your choice already. As you stood before me, unrelenting, I dreamed about reaching deep inside of you, where that blood had come from, and tearing the child away from you. I was afraid that you were going to hurt it, hurt yourself, that I would lose everything. But you were so serene. It made me so fucking afraid. You whispered like an angel, told me that all your friends were waiting. That you were sure about this time, that the baby had told you so.
As the last hours approached I went into the streets, into the frenzy and the desperation, because your serenity was unbearable, it was the most terrifying thing. I haven’t seen you since, not in the daylight. There, I screamed at the top of my lungs with strangers and we all prayed to gods we didn’t believe in anymore. Nothing worked. You won.
When the planets started aligning, I left my fellow beings and I began walking. I didn’t care where. I just wanted to get as far away from you as possible. I remembered – I told you this once – that when I was young I used to be in love with the idea of dying in the night, of speeding up with my car on the way to the morning. I was so afraid of seeing the world as I left it. Walking away from the spheres, I realized that this fear of dawn was the only thing that I had left from the boy I once was, the only thing that proved to me that I had really been there, once, and that getting older was for nothing, that maybe there was no greater power than this terror and that I didn’t make the right use of it. As the world became dark, I understood that dawn would come and it would be terrifying – but that we wouldn’t be spared, that there would be no quick ending, and that the right fear was not of morning, but understanding – of truly seeing – the entity of the dark.
I have become familiar with this shade of the end, too. I wake up sometimes and call it morning and I speak to you, even though there is no light anymore and you are not there. It keeps one company, it helps with being left behind. There was a time where I thought I could never live without putting my hand on your lower back at parties, to remind you and everyone else that we were something that existed separately, that maybe we didn’t love each other but we had something, a life together. The first time I saw you you were part of the landscape, lying there with the same certainty of the sand surrounding you, of the stark rays of the sun. You were outside of history, of the bleakness of time. I remember you now as you were back then. You have left me now. You have taken our child away from me and you have made it a star I cannot see or name.
I don’t go to the sea anymore. We all walked all the time, towards no precise place, but just to keep the body in motion, to see the moon. Lately I just lie in this bed and wait for you.
I remember you one night, walking towards me. All context has been deleted from this image but your smile, your unbelievable smile, and my inability to describe the joy I felt in that moment, seeing you walk towards me. Centuries after, some sparkles of it have stayed with me, and I can still access them. You walked elegantly, as if on a string, as if your life depended on your precision, on putting one foot right after the other. But it was just a Friday night and you were walking towards me across the hallway. The day had been unbearably hot and night washed over us like some kind of balsam, and the sweetest was this, seeing you step towards me, your hands alongside your body, a sun bleached shirt of mine falling oversized on it. I thought I could have never loved anyone but you. Time has rendered the whole question meaningless.
There is nothing I fear anymore but the afterwards. I have lived in the black for far longer that anyone should be allowed to. I fear that I still won’t get to be with you this time, that you were right all along and death will just be a more definitive, a more concrete loneliness. That I will remain in absolute dark, where you cannot reside.
When morning will come – as if for the first time in history – all of this will be done. Your light will wash the world you have left emptied and will wash away all of us sinners, all of us unbelievers. Tonight I wish I could destroy the memories I hold of you, you walking towards me. I wish I could annihilate that moment, how it still makes me sway when it inevitably returns to me with the colour of true night and the notes of some guitar. You will never be that girl again, I will never be those eyes again. None of what was will ever be again, ages has passed since, in the dark. And now you come to usher a new age of life, one without mankind, and establish your empire of light. I hope to die alone, forgotten and forgetful, so that none of this makes its way back to you. I want you to see that you haven’t won, that your morning cannot conquer all, that you should’ve listened to me, should’ve married me, given me the child.
You went into the light without me. You have left me to a fate worse than death, because even the dead walk on fresh grass, someplace where it’s summer forever. You have made me walk in the ruins of this world, and this you will call love too. In a little while tomorrow will come and your light will consume the world, immanentize the eschaton. The sun you all have worked on for so long will finally come and clear the universe of shadows like me, once and for all. As the alarms blare I will leave this skeleton of a building and, one more time, I will walk away from you. I will refuse to look at you. I will not give you this. I loved you so much, desperately. Loving you made a broke man out of me and still I would do it all over again, for the privilege of witnessing you, of standing by your side throughout the years. But this, this I cannot love.
Tonight I lay in the dark, where I can convince myself that you are right there, sleeping next to me. That tomorrow a new day will come and it will not be the end or your beginning and that it will not ask of me the greatest bravery of my life. You will still be there. I will lie down next to you. There will be no difference between memory and desire, between light and dark, between you and me. Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this what you were so afraid of?