Dear Yuki,
I have no heart and I must feel.

The ghost of the feeling man I was still haunts my limbs, compels me to emotive action, but all attempts at emotional presence end in failure. I have fully merged with the inertia of my surroundings. I am as unfeeling as this large black desk, which right now is cool to the touch. There's something artificial about the way I move around through my life, something plastic and hollow. A discarded toy with a dead battery, I can't be made to go.

I lie in bed with my lover and become infinitely aware of my body's inner works. This awareness closes out the rest of the world, including the one rubbing right up against my skin - hers. I find acknowledging the presence of others an absurdly tedious endeavor. Not superficial acknowledgment - the senses offer life's most crude and boring data - but spiritual acknowledgment. People are little chaotic storms of contradictions, imperfect expressions, inner confusions and outer misunderstandings. We glance and carom off each other with terrifying recklessness. How many times have I thought myself right about somebody, only to be proven wrong, then wrong again, and again? Humans elude understanding, of each other and of themselves, and that which feels like or resembles understanding is fleeting or illusory, the soul evolves away from our silly attempts at explanation. Simplicities, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves as networks of smaller complexities. We are subtle or crude according to the power of our microscopes. There's no point being content with the atomic level of desires and motives, strengths and weaknesses, when these themselves are composed of sub-atomic, unknowable flickerings and urges, non-linear time, improbable connections and dim instincts. But we need a common vocabulary just to get by. The one at my disposal leads to more anarchy than harmony, it seems, and this closing out I achieve by tightly wrapping consciousness around my physical body is the only peace I can find.

My heart is an obsolete machine in way over its head with all this modern data. It whirs and groans and grinds through the day. It freezes, halts and hiccups. Get me to a place far from this constant bombardment of incompatible information. This John Henry job of assimilation is killing me.

I'll never understand this beautiful girl breathing quietly beside me, nor this shadow of a complete human being lurking within. Shadows holding shadows. Wind encompassing light.

I hate my heart and it is my closest enemy. Right here in my chest. It betrays, lies, shows up when it isn't wanted and can't be found when it is. Nameless, it works diligently against me while I sleep.

Only the past, with you in it, is pristine without its burden of real-time awareness. Consciousness, the great muddler.

Love,
Davi