Yes, let them be happy and continue to live, work, pay their mortgage, take care of old Mum and Dad, moan sweetly in their beds, moan in pain in their beds, go to bars, go to foreign cities, send genes into the future—all while my body burns. I’m afraid of all of you. I hate you all.

I clamber onto the fountain, onto the elephant’s head and rant: “I am a murderer! Arrest me! Burn me at the stake!” No one cares. A crowd gathers, people laugh, take pictures, and move on, like they always do. Police pull me off the monument, tourists thrust change into my pocket and send me on my way.

Ho-hum. There’s our cafe and our table. Come and sit with me. As evening descends upon the city, I sit here writing, keeping a surreptitious eye on the new arrivals. There’s a football game playing on TV, the tables are stacked with food and beer, barkers whip up custom—“a symphony orchestra this evening!”—the shuffling of feet, the clatter of wheeled suitcases, the peck of women’s heels. Across the square, a little line of memory-hunters has formed a line outside the souvenir shop, somewhere children are laughing. All these images freeze into pointless memories in my brain—like the ten objects cast into the air for that Dali photograph. Now they’re not worth a damn, because they’re destined to be erased from all the hard drives of the Universe soon. Too soon.

“Si è scordato di me?” I ask the waiter. “It’s been five minutes since I ordered my coffee. I’m in a real hurry.”

The waiter ignores me.

Every three seconds—the time it takes to breath in and out—forty-five people die all over the planet. That’s a crude statistic, only the deaths that are being counted. Some go missing. In the time I’ve spent writing this letter to you, fifty-four thousand people have ceased to exist. And I am going to be one of them. Fuck. I don’t want to die, my love. I love nurturing my contempt. I love sleeping and writing letters. I love how, over the years, an architect’s sketches will leave the page and become real buildings. I love looking out of an aeroplane, watching the clouds drift every which way. I love broken umbrellas, the sound of forties jazz coming from a car parked at a traffic light. I love the smell of a snuffed candle, I love to be so far out at sea that I can’t see the shore. I love cleaning coffee machines, scribbling on maps with black markers, the laughter of young women, the sound of rain on a tin roof. I love loving you.