And so you didn’t want any more of that. And you stopped the possibility of pain, which no one gets away with. You just stopped and found nothing beyond it. I’m not saying I have much, but I still have intense searching and violent hope. Not that quiet and sweet voice of yours. And I don’t cry, if I need to one day I’ll scream, Lóri. I’m in the middle of a struggle and much closer to whatever people call a poor human victory than you, but it is a victory. I could already have you with my body and soul. I’ll wait for years if I must for you too to have a soul-body in order to love. We’re still young, we can waste some time without wasting our whole lives. But look at everyone around you and see what we’ve made of ourselves and considered our daily victory. We haven’t loved, that most of all. We haven’t accepted what we don’t understand because we don’t want to look stupid. We’ve hoarded things and reassurances because we don’t have each other. We don’t have any joy that hasn’t already been catalogued. We’ve built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, we’re afraid they’re traps. We haven’t surrendered to ourselves, because that would be the start of a long life and we’re afraid of that. We’ve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you’re afraid. We’ve organized smiley clubs and associations where you are served with or without soda. We’ve tried to save ourselves but without using the word salvation in order to avoid the embarrassment of being innocents. We haven’t used the word love so as not to have to recognize its contexture of hate, love, jealousy and so many other contradictories. We’ve kept our death a secret in order to make our life possible. Many of us make art because we don’t know what the other thing is like. We’ve disguised our indifference with false love, knowing that our indifference is disguised anguish. We’ve disguised with a small fear the greatest fear of all and that’s why we never speak of what really matters. Speaking about what really matters is considered a blunder. We haven’t worshipped because we have the sensible pettiness to remember on time the false gods. We haven’t been pure and naive in order not to laugh at ourselves and so that at each day’s close we can say “at least I didn’t do something stupid” and that way we don’t feel confused before putting out the light. We’ve smiled in public about things we wouldn’t smile about alone. We’ve called our candor weakness. We have feared each other, most of all. And all this we consider our daily victory. But I escaped that, Lóri, I escaped with the ferocity of someone escaping the plague, Lóri, and I’ll wait until you too are more ready.