But should one let someone in? Learn the sensation of touch slowly? Allow fingers to shape themselves and follow the curvature of a body? To observe up close and discover the surface textures? Of skin and forms of the epidermis? To absorb the scent? To recognize and memorize patterns of movement? Sounds? To let oneself be surprised by everything that cannot be known, remembered, or understood? To update one’s internal system with all those differences between oneself and not-oneself? To let someone enter deeper and deeper into you? To slowly latch on, to settle into your own mucous membranes? To reweave the network of synapses?

And for what? Why? I’ve been through this — it always ends the same. You’re left with a gap, a tear. With a hand suspended over a shape that’s no longer there. With a phantom scent in your nose. With an obsessive afterimage you neither have the strength nor the heart to chase away. Because it’s dear. The dearest. You’re left with an anchor embedded in a few moments from your own past. You drag it through your own guts, unable to gain momentum. Until it snaps. But it might not snap for a long time. Or ever. It has a thick, heavy chain.

I proclaim my own theory of evolution. From atom to phantom. Not development, but differentiation. Driven not by any law of selection, but by the illusion that such a thing is possible. That identical atoms can arrange themselves into profoundly different constellations. Why? That, I truly don’t know.