# On The Departure Of A Hieroglyph The letter arrived on a Tuesday, though which Tuesday no longer matters. What matters is that it arrived in the body of a dream—not my dream, but someone else's, someone who had borrowed my address the way one borrows an umbrella and forgets to return it. The letter spoke of departure. Not a person departing, but a symbol. A *hieroglyph*, to be precise. It had grown tired of meaning, the letter said. Tired of the weight of interpretation, the ceaseless burden of being *read*. I laughed when I first read it. Or did I? Memory has a way of folding in on itself, like a letter written but never sent. The hieroglyph in question was simple enough—a house, seen from above, with a circle in the center. For centuries it had meant *home*. Home in the oldest languages, home in the way that word sits in the stomach like a meal one cannot quite digest. But the hieroglyph had begun to hunger for something else. Ambiguity, perhaps. Or silence. "I no longer wish to *mean*," the letter read. "I wish only to *be*." This was the part that unsettled me. Because once a symbol stops meaning, does it not simply become a shape? And what are we, in the end, but shapes animated by the certainty that we mean something to someone? I looked for the hieroglyph in my study that evening. I found it, naturally, in a book I had not opened in years. The symbol stared back at me with perfect indifference. It had already left, I realized. What remained was only its ghost—the hollow space where meaning used to live. By Wednesday, I had begun to forget what it looked like. By Sunday, I could no longer remember if it had ever existed at all. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the true departure of a hieroglyph is not when it leaves, but when we forget that it ever taught us anything at all. When the house, seen from above, with a circle in the center, becomes nothing more than a house, seen from above, with a circle in the center—beautiful, empty, entirely its own. The letter, when I finally looked for it again, had vanished too. I do not know if I ever received it, or if I simply dreamed it in someone else's dream. But sometimes, in moments of profound ordinariness, I see that symbol in the corner of my eye—not *meaning* home anymore, but *being* it. And I understand, at last, what it means to let something go.

# Untitled

I have to forget it, to find my way out when I don’t know how many steps remain. I have to see how many steps, how many steps come from love! Four or five? Better not more than that—even invented lies wear you down. I should be able to say I was happy like I haven’t been in years, and perhaps that’s all I could have been. Not even a month, in small measures, after fifteen years—I could have done something real, caught up in happiness and died. Wouldn’t there have been some irony in that? At least that’s what I might have understood: drowning suddenly in too much happiness, swallowing it whole, dying.

First. Yes! Break all ties—that’s the first step. There must be no object to remind you, because without obstacles in the way, forgetting becomes easier, even unintentional. Every thought, every longing that might come in the evening or morning, or when inevitably you see lovers on the street—that desire becomes pain. The energy that until recently was only—the very source of happiness—it still gathers in a single heap, like a campfire, in the middle of the soul, where there is more friction, and then waits to catch fire. When it burns, everything that comes to mind is drawn automatically into the flames. It will burn smoldering, sometimes thick with smoke, because many hopes are still alive, still green, still aching with longing but bearing the burning you gave them before you died.

The burning can last quite a long time, but it’s a step you cannot skip—it is forbidden to leave anything unburned, because in that place there must be neither debris nor heat. Once extinguished, gone—the fire that consumed everything leaves behind a void. This emptiness is necessary. The longer the fire stretches, the more it consumes of what happened in love, the sooner regrets can take root, one by one. Not small regrets each time memory or a word or a state rises from the depths of memory or perception, but only the great ones, imperious, all-consuming, like a storm sweeping through the void and reshaping it with the power to dominate and compel surrender.

If the storm passes—and it is a rule that storms, however fierce their dominion, cannot endure forever—when it has spent its fury and moved on, there remains a fragile but wholly new place, a world beginning again, which we will learn to navigate anew, first with trepidation, but we will take those first steps once the tempest has gone. It is a universal law; we do not know how it unfolds, yet the return is as inevitable as pain or sorrow. What survives, then, in the wake of such a love? Perhaps only a photograph and nothing more—a simple image that can be placed in an album, that can be looked upon from time to time with a nostalgia from which hardly anything remains to be truly understood.

I begin to gather all the thoughts and images, all the things that have occurred, into a single heap—all of it cast there without care for order or for the pain their gathering will cause. All of it must be collected. And then the fire must begin, almost at once. At first everything is so alive, so green, that it will extinguish again and again. You will find yourself reaching into the flames to retrieve a memory you feel you cannot part with, that you believe you cannot let burn away forever. It seemed to you that your own soul, your heart, even your mind would fill with fire and burn if you did not save it. But the rule is not to preserve anything; on the contrary, it is to begin discarding what is most agonizing—to let the things you imagine will tear you to shreds be the first consumed by flame, to burn. You already know the pain will be doubled; you will wound the memory of love, and it will wound you as it burns. But the sooner those essential memories depart, the sooner the smaller things will remain at the end—sometimes comical, for instance, all the small flaws that made you laugh—the faster and more complete the burning becomes, and the void that remains, now hollow and waiting, will sustain you more and more, will keep you alive.

# Untitled

It’s not really a void; it’s not a void. It’s merely a void of love, and every such void carries smoke from a fire already spent, perhaps ash trailing behind it—but ash has the power to alter meaning. Suffering becomes waiting. Now I take this love that came unforeseen, this boundless longing that has drowned every other feeling, transforming into true love, the most beautiful and honest of memories. It’s the first I’m throwing away—so vivid it wounds me, so difficult to release—but I hope that if I begin with it, the rest will follow of its own accord. All this love stored online, every written word that for some may hold no weight of gesture, yet has passed through my soul as real as any fact.

I don’t know if I’ll delete them all at once, because there were months of joy in which I let myself be happy by forgetting myself and the world around me. I’m going to erase all the messages, every last one. Once the deleted messages vanish in an instant, that erasure will suffice, because in truth, I will have deleted everything that gave me that feeling online—all those words hanging pleasantly in space. And only from there, perhaps, when the words burn, after a simple delete, will come nothing. They’ll disappear, won’t even hurt like things in the present now, like red or yellow flowers. An evening we ate and then we walked; an afternoon where we only kissed and held each other—everything! Lucky as I am, I have little to throw away; all of it gathered makes a pile that will barely kindle, but sometimes when there’s so little, it burns hard and long.

In truth, it’s not right; it’s never good when love ends, whether it’s short and fierce like ours or prolonged and gradually dissipated until something nearly dies but never quite. Short loves are difficult to burn because when a desire isn’t entirely consumed, you’re left with the impression that something might have continued. Moreover, there’s the regret of not knowing its span, how much further it might have stretched into feeling and mood and glances and real love and kisses—all those things from which love is made and which sometimes can’t even be named or imagined as love, but only when you love can you understand them.

I don’t have many memories—perhaps just when he said he’d be my anchor, or when he told me he adored me, and I clung to those words like they were everything. I remember his laughter, careless and bright, the child still living in him, the way love would bloom in his eyes when we looked at each other. All of it stacked like kindling, memory upon memory, and I feel the pull to light the match. But I hesitate, waiting, thinking perhaps the next moment will bring something like mercy. You wait for the fire to consume it all, hoping against reason that something—anything—might survive intact. But you don’t really understand what’s being asked of you: you’re not allowed to save anything. The burning must be total, or healing never comes.

Sometimes in a relationship, leaving is far gentler than explaining. When you find yourself forever justifying your ground, forever needing justification from the other side, when that becomes the rhythm—that’s when you know. It’s time to go. Peace won’t come any other way.

You have to walk into the fire yourself. You can’t stand at the edges trying to slow the flames, because holding back only builds pressure elsewhere, and that explosion would consume more than memory—it would devour pieces of your soul. That’s the real danger: not burning away what’s still useful, but letting the fire consume every part of you until there’s nothing left but ash, not a phoenix that rises again but simply the burned-out husk of a person. Burned souls don’t recover. So when the fire is hot enough, when it’s finally enough, you have to be ruthless. Put everything in—the memories, the hopes, all of it. Hold nothing back. What good would it do to keep them? Better to let them burn without hesitation, even though it tears at you now. Yes, it hurts in the flames. But afterward, there won’t even be the memory of that pain. Fire leaves no trace of its own burning.

You need courage for this. You have to feed the flames with everything you thought was love—because a love that ends is nothing but illusions anyway, fantasies made easy to untangle from the painful parts. The dangerous mistake is starting with the wrong memories. If you burn away only what hurts, you might wake one day surprised by all the beautiful moments still intact, and they’ll weave themselves into something perfect, something whole. You’ll be caught in that trap. So burn the happiness first—always the happiness first, the ones that make your chest ache, the ones that reach down to the very bottom of you. That love came without warning, a whisper of breeze across still water, and then it swelled into waves and torrents, into words and wind that swept everything away.

# A Love on Half a Bed

A love on half a bed trembled because there was a time when we wanted it, a love that was demanded made itself at once into a commandment above anything we might have thought or chosen before we arrived there. This will go away first, without ceremony, because in my long solitude that I have missed—everything I truly lacked, every comfort, every glance that was mine alone—what could be harder than surrendering it forever? On fire, without looking back or forward, without consulting my own heart that might wish to remember. There must be no memory left; you must render yourself incapable of forming any more memories, because every small memory hurts as much as all of them gathered in one place. And so, if you collect them and set them ablaze at once, it will not hurt more.

On the contrary—by gathering them together, you will feel only pain, and who can measure pain against sorrow, weigh one against another? No one. I wish I had the strength not to say what everyone counsels me to say: it was lovely for a month and then it wasn’t—that’s all. But when you are in the middle of that month, how can you think from the outside? From out here it seems simple, but when you’re inside it cannot be that way, because happiness is never sufficient for you, contentment is never enough, and on those rare occasions when you find it and recognize what you’ve found—how impossible it is to let go.

This will never happen to me again because I will never offer anyone another chance as long as I live. This is the last time. I should have decided this long ago, but I don’t know why I didn’t—I was drunk on the mirage that someone else might arrive. And in my case, someone did… for a month, not even a year like that song of mine, but a month, nothing more. I will recover from it by every method I know now, no forgotten or neglected remedy ignored, discarding everything because that’s the only way you find what actually works—chosen at random from the few that exist. But truly, there is no recipe; there is no way to return to before. It’s really a disaster, because each time you become sadder and more preoccupied and more distant, and each time you swear it will be the last, each time you begin again.

I don’t know how long it will take to move past this. I have no idea. But it’s unbearably difficult, because the memories remain. We managed to step outside the present moment and inhabit a time entirely our own—a place where happiness, that rare and precious thing, became possible. Yes, I think we achieved that: we learned to see the end of what we had as something natural, something that needn’t destroy what we built but could, perhaps, deepen it. It sounds lovely when I say it like this, but I have a terrible feeling that reality unfolded differently. And I wish I were wrong.

The truth is, I want to stay with him. I don’t want to leave. Because after all this searching, I’ve finally found where I belong. With him. In him. Beside him. That’s what I’ve discovered—the equilibrium I’ve chased so many times and never found. And I don’t need words or elaborate ideas to prove it. I only need him to *feel* it, to recognize it in my presence. His presence gives me this state of being—not always, not when he too fractures and becomes unreachable, when reality crowds in and disturbs everything. But when we’re truly together, just the two of us, the universe reorganizes itself. We become the only two essentials in it, and everything feels natural.

Beyond love itself, beyond the act of making love, there’s this: that *we mean something together*. We’re a hieroglyph that only makes sense when we’re read as one. But then I feel it slipping away. I don’t know if this feeling will endure. The change in me astonishes me. I’m calm now—calmer than I’ve been in years—and I want nothing but this. Just him. His words, his voice, his company. No subject bores me anymore, nothing seems distant or irrelevant.

And yet the happiness won’t hold. It can’t, because I remember: this isn’t a life. It’s a holiday. It’s an interlude. And though I can’t fathom why it must end, I know it will. The ending is already written—just as it was in every other love of my life. However the script changes, however differently I thought I’d rewritten my fate, the pattern persists. I carry it with me. I cannot shed it, no matter what I do.