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If you were still alive, would we be friends? I was more attached to other boys. But time has seen me drift apart from them without my even noticing. All that would be needed to renew the bond would be a telephone call, but none of us are willing to risk the disillusionment of a reunion. Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice. Your responses satisfy
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You are a book that speaks to me whenever I need it. Your death has written your life.
You never read Neruda’s Residence on Earth, for fear that the poems in that collection wouldn’t live up to their title. Being unknown, they were more real to you than they would have been if they had disappointed upon reading.
In public, your quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable, as if you were a breathing statue, indifferent to all the frivolous movement that the stillness of a statue so underlines.
You used to say it was better to listen to rock in a foreign language that you knew poorly. How beautiful the words were if they were only half understood.
A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning.
You wanted to know your future, less to reassure yourself about what you would become than to live through anticipation the life that awaited you.
You did not think that, when they conceived you, your parents were any more reasonable than you currently were. Guessing at the selfishness and the levity of their decision distressed you. So you came to believe that you had been less desired for what you were than for what they imagined you would be. You felt like an impostor, because you knew that, though you had not disappointed them, you never resembled the dreams they had built around you.
