“Don’t be angry, Kri. I don’t mean to insult your sister for a moment. All I’m trying to do is find words for the strangeness of a lover’s existence. Let me put it this way: although she is here in this picture, it shows her only as she was at a certain moment in the past. But I feel that here in this emerald she gave me when we parted is her soul, just as she is now at this moment. In my mind, the emerald and the picture—her body and her soul—were separated. But look now: the two are reunited.
