In the dream, her eyes seemed to accuse me of something; to pierce me, burn me, destroy me. But her gaze was still there, in spite of those tricks from the censors; the censors who must have woken me up, calling desperately on the resources of my clumsy waking state to put a stop to things. But her gaze was still there. There was nothing accusatory, or piercing, or burning, or destructive about it. There was only love, love that I wasn’t ready to accept. Love, what’s more, that wasn’t necessarily aimed at me, although I was part of what she loved – which was probably everything in the world, because her capacity to love hadn’t yet been destroyed. Until that moment I’d never seen love in anyone’s eyes. Not even in films. They weren’t the shining eyes of a girl in love, but a docile loving gaze. And the gaze was still there. And it was still there. And it is still there. And it’s still here now, I promise you it’s still living inside me, you glorious girl; it doesn’t matter that I never saw you again, it doesn’t matter if you’ve become a plump woman laden with children and your gaze has turned bovine. That girl is alive, I promise you, and she always will be, because there’s a dimension of reality in which these things don’t die; they don’t die because they’ve never been born and nobody owns them and they’re not subject to time and space. Love, the spirit, is an eternal breeze, fluttering down the empty tubes that we are. It’s not your photograph I carry in my soul, featureless girl; it’s your gaze, the very thing that was never yours, that was never you.