I was so happy to get your letter. It has been quite unpleasant here recently. Germany’s cold is the kind you feel down to your nerves. Even when you are warm inside, you cannot help but be aware that it is out there, that horrible winter.

I have been missing you greatly. I have missed having your words arrive in the mail, missed seeing the ink collecting in blotches as you collect yourself. So it gave me much joy to see that you have written, especially given that I left you after that unpleasant incident.

I was so happy, but—I don’t know. Not quite happy entirely, do you know? I sometimes think I don’t know how to be happy at all. At other times I think it has to do with you, that some of your sadness has seeped so deep into me that now I cannot escape it.

Lately, I have been dreaming rather strange dreams.

Perhaps the strangest thing about them is that I do not always have to be asleep for them to begin.

There is one that has become a most frequent night-time visitor.

In this dream, you are dying. Slowly, bit by part. Cancer, of course. When they had to take your poisoned breasts, you cried and cried and said you didn’t want me to touch you because you didn’t feel like a girl anymore. I kissed you anyway, obviously. How could I not?

I kept remembering lying face-down in your hair.

My left hand on your right breast (now a memory and sometimes a phantom handful), my body spilling over yours, my face in your hair. Upturned in your hair. Nose-down in your hair. Smelling your hair. White jasmine and your sex-sweat. Your sex-sweat smells different from your normal sweat. You smell different when I hug you after your return from your manic runs from when I lie face-down in your hair, happily immobile.

As the chemicals kept going in, your hair started falling out. And I realized I must learn to love a you minus all these things I loved about you. I must, I must learn.

I dream of this before I sleep and it is one of the good dreams, dramatic and poignant. I play it often, savour it slowly, sometimes till the end and sometimes only a little bit.