Meeting without encounter

 

Do you remember the first day we met?

We were walking down a deserted street in rainy weather. The pavement was uneven, holding thin pools of water that reflected broken light. On one side there were trees, dark and motionless, on the other the sea—restless, breathing audibly—and in the distance the city lights hovered like a separate promise, dimmed by mist. It was there—while walking through empty streets to forget all this nonsense and to feel myself reset, even briefly—that I saw you.

You were not there to wander. You were not a tourist; you belonged to that climate. This was evident in your silent yet proud presence, in the way you carried yourself as if the night required no permission from you. You radiated a sense of being at home without needing to declare it. What were you doing there at that hour of the night? There was no need to ask. Night simply exists; unlike daytime, it does not corner a person with explanations. You knew this. That is why our silences spoke that day, not our words.

True to an old habit I could never fully shed—my tendency to look past people—I did not look at you directly, not at first. I let my gaze slide away, as if avoiding interruption. Yet my heart began to beat only for you in that very moment, against my own caution. I sensed the poetic soul beneath that relentless exterior, though I could not have proven it then. Perhaps it was intuition, perhaps projection—but it was precise enough to wound me. 

How did you arrive at these days? How did you endure the noise of people? You carried the solitude I carried. Our solitudes were siblings; they recognized one another without ceremony.

There was nobility in this.

There was authenticity.

There was the refusal to abandon one’s faith, even merely to establish a temporary connection.

That is why I loved you most—because you were, in practical terms, unlovable. Loving you required something beyond words and touch, something that could not be rehearsed. And I, too, lived in abstraction; I existed theoretically, suspended more than embodied, much like you. That is why it was not my hands but my soul that caressed your hair—because the body alone would have been insufficient, almost dishonest.

Between us, there are only us—because we are both unreachable. There is no spectacle here, no contamination of display, no need to be seen.

I appreciate your effort to reach me, yet you are still following a path—a path that is unmistakably your own. That path will not lead you to me; it will lead you back to yourself. This is not failure. It is design.

You know that I am stuck between worlds—one resembling heaven, the other resembling hell. I live on that threshold, and it demands stillness. And you are trying to reach that threshold with a map in your hand. Yet you belong to one of those worlds. To reach me, you must first abandon your world and tear that map apart.

When that happens, I will not greet you standing like a treasure laid out before you. I will not confirm arrival. On the contrary, you will enter the atmosphere I inhabit—and since I am that atmosphere itself, this will be the most absolute form of meeting possible for me.

And what am I doing?

I am also trying to reach you by my own path, because we are both loyal only to ourselves. These paths return us to ourselves. I believe the entire matter lies within us. Our souls tell us to stop opening outward, because they know that souls are already the outside itself.

By walking different paths, we arrive at the same center. Those centers hold us together but do not unite us—because union would mean the dissolution of those centers, and that would mean the death of our love.

As I write these words to you, I am giving voice to that place within me, because that is the only reality I trust. And right now, that reality is speaking. Had I abandoned it, no one would be speaking at all—and the same is true for you.

I see you not as you are, but as I wish to see you. I am aware of this. I know that you do the same with me. Because we both know that who we truly are is precisely these versions we wish to see, not the versions the world wishes to impose.

Atrona.