# The Shadow-Man's Confession I am nobody. I have no name, no address, no telephone number. I don't exist in any official record—not even as a mistake or a footnote. If you were to search for me in the census, the tax office, or the police station, you'd find nothing but silence and empty air. This wasn't always my condition. There was a time when I had a name that people called out loud, when I had a house where the postman knew to deliver my mail, when I possessed the small certainties that make a man real. But all of that has been erased now, like pencil marks rubbed away on old paper. I became a shadow-man gradually, without noticing the exact moment it happened. Perhaps it was the day my name got struck from the voter rolls. Or maybe it was when my landlord changed the lock and rented out my room to someone else. Or could it have been the morning I couldn't find a single person willing to swear that they knew me, that I had existed in their lives in any meaningful way? Now I move through the city like a man underwater. The crowds part around me without seeing me. I can sit in a tea stall for hours, and the owner never charges me—not out of kindness, but because I've ceased to register on his consciousness. Sometimes I steal, but even the shopkeepers don't remember me stealing. I've become a phantom of convention, a permitted absence. The strange thing is how easily the world accommodates such a man. No one questions my presence because no one questions it. I have become the perfect witness to everything—visible and invisible at once. But the truth I must confess is this: I'm not entirely sure anymore whether I disappeared from the world, or whether I was simply never there to begin with.

If ever you've stepped back from a misunderstanding...send me music, and the distance between us will shrink.

Being misunderstood would have been better than never being understood at all.

Love cannot be forced, yet people desire it like beggars at a shrine.

One day, even the closest person vanishes into the crowd of the dead. Then the chest trembles with unbearable pain—that image chases you like a nightmare, relentless, without rest.

Never write anything about me. You'll suffer too, terribly—as much as I do, constantly.

You don't have to say you love me. I'm a person of such fragile sensibilities—I'll shatter at the slightest blow. Better you keep this heavy weapon hidden away where it is.

I hold you with such care, I touch your eyes—more than you could ever imagine. My prayers for you are more perfect than any sound you've ever heard. I haven't told you, and you'll regret it—I don't want the fear of losing me to nest inside you. This alone will cause you terrible pain, unbearable pain!

We will never meet again, I'll make sure of it myself—if you embrace me even once more, I can never forgive myself.

If it's possible, never let our memories fade. Memory is just this—the words I've written about you.

You shouldn't think that I was merely a well-wisher of yours, or a devoted reader, or that I'd simply fallen in love with your voice or your beauty—there's no reason for such thoughts.

I am a nobody—I have no role in your life.

Yet you could never have thrown me away even if you'd wanted to, and you never even tried to hold on—this alone has comforted me. Though I am free, you're trapped in an invisible prism; the day I choose the path of suicide, even if you wish it, you won't be able to break through that prism and escape.

Suicide is no solution, I know you'll say—you'll speak of a thousand beautiful reasons to live, recite indifferent poems in the mad dialogue of love that stirs the storm—but what good is it? I don't want to hear any of it.

You don't know—the fixed boundaries of your laughter, the depth of your gaze, and how many terrible tales of a happy life I've written with the touch of your hand. Don't ask to know; you couldn't bear it.

I want the ambiguity of my love to remain in your eyes, in your understanding, in your limitations—stay well, or all of this will have been in vain.