More than twenty years have swept by, but certain aspects of that moment have not gone from my memory. Not only that moment alone, but all the moments we spent together—yes, even the most awful—are wholly alive for me. That which pains me even more than my self-accusation, my regret, is your face. That face, a mask of tears.

Will you forgive me? And if you are unable to forgive me, will you at least remember that I seek it of you?

Even wearing glasses with the highest power I could get, I still can’t make out the details of any of these things. Individual shapes and gestures blur together, and any clarity is brought about only through the strength of my imagination.

The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

When we take as true the premise that if something is lost, something else is gained, given that I lost you, what have I gained? What will I now gain through the loss of the visible world?

Why had I been such a fool when it came to loving you? My love for you wasn’t foolish, but I was; had my own innate foolishness made love itself foolish? Or is it that I myself wasn’t all that foolish, but love’s inherent foolishness awakened any foolishness latent in me and eventually smashed everything to pieces?

When I walk into complete darkness, is it all right if I remember you without this unrelenting ache?

To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

The hatred that had boiled up in her a long time ago went on seething, and the agony that used to surge in her remained swollen, a blister that wouldn’t burst. Nothing healed. Nothing ended.

She walks in order to exhaust herself to the point of no longer being able to walk. She walks until she is unable to register the quiet of the house to which she must now return, until she has no strength left to cast her gaze over the black woods, the black curtains, the black sofa, the black Lego boxes. She walks until, giddy with tiredness, she will be able to lie down on her side on the sofa and fall asleep without washing or tugging a quilt over herself. She walks so that she will not wake in the middle of the night even if plagued by nightmares, so that she will not toss and turn with her eyes open until dawn, unable to achieve sleep again. She walks so that, in those vivid dawn hours, she will not have to doggedly recall and piece together the broken shards of memories.

Makes no judgments. Ascribes no emotions. Everything appears as fragments, scatters as fragments. Disappears. Words grow a little more distant from the body. Emotions that had saturated them, like heavy layers of shadow, like stench and nausea, like something viscous, fall away. Like tiles that, long under water, have lost their adhesiveness. Like a part of one’s flesh that has rotted without one’s knowing.

“In the part that argues everything has within it that which harms it, he uses the example of how the inflammation of the eye ruins the eye and blinds it, and how rust ruins iron and completely shatters it. Why, then, isn’t the human soul, which is analogous to such things, ruined by its foolish, bad attributes?”

That you’d experienced enough suffering yourself to talk unreservedly about whatever misfortunes the world had to offer.

You tore down with your own hands everything that was between us. I fled far and fast, wounding you deeply. I resented you. I couldn’t sleep for longing to see the you who was not you. I yearned like madness only for the you who was not you.

She leans forward. Tightens her grip on the pencil. Lowers her head further. The words evade her grasp. Words that have lost lips, words that have lost tongue and tooth-root, words that have lost throat and breath remain out of reach. Like unbodied apparitions, their forms elude touch.