The chasm dividing us widens daily. I flee from myself through time and life. It is terror and death that has me on the run, but it is you too that I am escaping from. The white trails of aircraft turbines push me onward. The letters coalesce ever more slowly, losing their meaning, as though translated into a foreign tongue and then back again, and it seems to me sometimes like there aren’t words to adequately describe a person’s changing feelings for another. I operate with the primitive symbolism of written characters; this crooked mirror only reflects my degraded inner life, not the beauty that I would like to show you. What I say to you today will sound hollow tomorrow.

(On the other hand, am I being completely honest blaming the cage of linguistics? Who knows, maybe it’s my incompetence that prevents me from expressing my thoughts clearly.) That is why I wish I could reach for the words of some language unknown to you: so that my thoughts might reach you through the blanks and punctuation scattered across these notes .

It’s sunny in Catania today. I just woke up from yet another dream, on this bench at the port, where we used to sit and watch the yachts sailing in and out. Next to me, case files, stacks of papers describing my dreams, envelopes, stamps, pills and credit card; these are my only belongings now. You know, there’s no problem in life that cannot be solved with the right combination of painkillers, anti-depressants, and stimulants. I mean, leaving aside the fact that I have, at best, only three months left to live.

What would you do if that was all the time you had left? Would you even think of me? Would you hop on a plane and come to the city where we first met to relive all the happy memories? Somehow, this now seems to be the only place I’ve ever felt anything. And almost certainly the last.

Fuck. I still can’t take in that this is not just another nightmare.