Roddur! A whole year has passed without a word between us, and yet not a single day has gone by when I haven't spoken to you in my mind. Through all these brutal months, I've carried you with me. Each time I've found myself alone in this world, with no one beside me, I've searched for you—only you. I knew you would understand. If I'd drawn close to death, my only regret would have been tears for someone unseen, someone I never met.
I take antidepressants now. I've learned that to no one in this world do I matter. I am simply unbearable. There's nothing left I want or need. Only one prayer—that these wretched tears of mine cast no shadow on your path to happiness. I'm even afraid to cry now.
I'm terrified, Roddur. All I wish for is someone—just one person—to hold me with tenderness. I want to be the way I was before.
Roddur! Not long ago, I believed we'd meet one day, even if it came at the end. But how fragile our lives truly are. In a cursed city like Dhaka, life itself is uncertain.
As I climb back toward health, a new fear takes hold. Will everything end? Will it all simply stop one day? Have we run out of time? If we have, then there's nothing left to do. Yet I live in hope—someday we'll see each other.
Tell me, Roddur—doesn't life wake again, even as everything draws to a close? My days aren't as dark now; weeks back, I would sink deeper with each passing day, and I thought that was all there was. Now I listen to songs that move me, I do things I love, seeing you brings joy—and unbearable pain. But this pain, for some reason, feels sacred; such pure suffering makes even the act of living feel sacred.
You know, I'm longing to go somewhere, to travel! I've been trapped indoors for so long. I don't speak to anyone now; I have no desire for conversation. Perhaps even when we finally meet, I won't be able to speak. I've become half-mute.
Be well, Roddur. Seeing you at peace eases my pain.
Consciousness knows no distance. The problem is only flesh.
I'm done, Roddur. I can't go on. There's no air anywhere. I cannot breathe.
# The Boundlessness of Consciousness The photograph lay on the table like an accusation. Ravi stared at it without touching, as if his fingers might disturb the dust of years that had settled over that particular morning. He was seventeen in the picture. Seventeen and impossible — caught mid-stride on a street he no longer recognized, his arm around a girl whose name had slipped away like water through open hands. The clothes belonged to another era. So did the face. So did everything. "You're thinking too hard," Meera said from the doorway. She'd learned to recognize the expression — a certain tightness around the eyes, a holding of breath as though he were listening to something no one else could hear. "I don't remember this," he said. "I don't remember being him." "You *were* him." "No." He picked up the photograph now, felt its waxy smoothness. "I was occupying his body. There's a difference." Meera pulled a chair across the floor and sat beside him. She had the kind of patience that came from loving someone for thirty years — patient not because she believed things would resolve, but because some things don't need resolution. They need presence. "The girl," Meera said, pointing. "That's Anjali." "I know who it is." "You loved her." Ravi set the photograph down carefully. "I remember the concept. Like reading about love in a book. Understanding the plot without feeling the weather of it." This was the persistent strangeness of his condition — a perfectly intact memory that felt like it belonged to someone else. The doctors had their terms for it. Depersonalization. Dissociative disorder. Words that tried to make a cage out of his particular infinity. Ravi had stopped listening to them years ago. "She asked about you," Meera said quietly. "Last month. At the market." "What did you tell her?" "That you were well. That you thought of her sometimes." Meera paused. "I lied about the second part." Ravi smiled without warmth. "Why?" "Because the truth would have hurt her. You *don't* think of her. Not in the way that matters. You think of the idea of thinking of her. It's like watching someone else's memories through glass." "Yes," he said. It was the most honest anyone had been with him in years. "Exactly like that." The afternoon light moved across the table in a slow migration. Ravi watched it, the way it caught on the edges of the photograph, momentarily illuminating that frozen boy and that girl whose name he could pronounce but could not truly recall. There was a peculiar freedom in it, he had come to understand. Most people were imprisoned by their own pasts, dragging them like chains. He'd simply slipped out of his. The weight had fallen away. He existed in a kind of eternal present, unanchored, untethered. And yet. And yet there was Meera, still sitting beside him. There was the habit of her hand reaching for his. There was the way she'd learned to love him not for the depth of his feeling, but for the steadiness of his presence. A different kind of love. Thinner, perhaps. But also — he'd come to think — truer. Because it asked nothing of him but to remain. "I'm sorry," he said. "For what?" "For not being able to miss you when you're gone." Meera took his hand. Her skin was warm, real, immediate. "I know," she said. "That's never been the problem." The photograph lay between them, that boy and that girl, suspended in a moment that had never truly happened — not to him, anyway. Not to the self that existed now, watching from behind glass. But it had happened to someone. That much he still knew. The evidence was there, crystalline and irrefutable, a proof of a life lived by a stranger who wore his face. "What are you thinking?" Meera asked. Ravi considered the question seriously. "That consciousness is like that," he said, gesturing at the photograph. "Like a distance you can see across but never close. We think we're inside our own lives, but really we're always watching them from somewhere else. Some of us just know it." Meera didn't respond immediately. She was good at sitting with silence, at not trying to fix what couldn't be fixed. After a while, she squeezed his hand — a small gesture, almost unconscious. A reminder that some things don't require memory to matter. The light continued its passage. The photograph continued its accusation. And Ravi continued to exist in that strange, limitless space where nothing quite touched him, yet everything somehow remained.
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