How even one word can change everything, so you don’t use it. You don’t say it. How one word is a catalyst for a breach or a copula. You hold onto a word or you let a word go. You let it do its breaking. How something like “thank you,” which is meant to conjoin, can actually separate. How one word becomes a thread that snaps or a thread that ties. You and another person, like in Pasolini’s Decameron, where one character tells another, ‘Say just one word and you’ll save both my life and yours.’

And now I understand why you, X., didn’t say goodbye. Why you just got up and walked away on our last night at school. Only now it doesn’t matter why you did what you did. Why you didn’t say what you didn’t say. Sometimes a reason is not enough. Sometimes a reason expires. The way when you have love, it’s anamorphic, so it’s there even when it’s not there in plain view. Like cinemascope it wraps around. Is wider than you can imagine. Shows the entire picture, the whole picture, even the picture that doesn’t show. The picture you can’t see.

For months I felt you, X., everywhere. I thought it was real. The feeling, which felt like your actual body coming towards me. The law of physics, which says we must both be doing this—thinking this, feeling this at the exact same time—for such a magnetic pull to occur. I thought you were actually somewhere near me, all the time. Thought that like a character in a movie, it meant you were coming.

This overpowering rush (premonition) of touch, which is also an epiphany. Intelligence. Maybe alien, but destiny is really desire’s true dwelling. A body showing up, arriving, reaching yours. Like a telegram. The other’s body as a home for your body. When everyone in class, including my Avital Ronell, says that unity with the other is impossible, I know better. As Badiou puts it, ‘Love is proof of Two.’ I know it’s been possible. I know all the theories, I just don’t believe them. At the end of the day, I believe in the possibility of the impossible, in communion, in the other as the only faith, in the odds and the stakes and the signs.