Of course, I will always come back to you but only insofar as you wear the clothes of the transcendent signified. You are only you when you are stripped of everything that is you, who becomes everything and everyone at the moment of meaning’s abnegation. We only exist in language and linguistics is the only relationship that connects us. But what about its grammar? What are the disguises that we inhabit to make sense of everything that we have become? What is the structure of your being, the syntax of your voice before you begin to sing? Why are we separated by a space between two words only to fulfill the delivery of thought, idea, into a sentence? What do sentences become if they are not sent and passively suspended in space?

As if when I put myself in the middle of every sentence, I speak and I arrive at Descarte’s cogito. I speak and I cannot deny myself even further. I am far from what I used to be. A word is a step of affirmation for myself that I, who is speaking right now am here, solipsistically speaking, I become a point of origin on an empty plane. And so when I speak of you, I find myself undeniable in relation to you as if I speak and say that you become the opposite of me who is present as you escape from my lips. We become a geometrical figure of a line in a plane: two points of origin in space connected by proximal relationship and we are arbitrarily attached to one another in the language of mathematics.

As if we are two different worlds with no knowledge of the other’s history. We reflect on the Other, halfway as we encounter each other until we put ourselves in the middle of our understanding of the other to situate ourselves within the context of our understanding.

What mediates us is gaze, and that is even an imaginary one such that both of us are performing in the absent gaze of one another. I am looking at you. Even though we are both denied by the physical presence of one another, we can only exist to one another as a hovering presence. Call it the denial of an impossibility because we can never physically meet. However, if there exists a possibility of an encounter for us, it would be an aberration of time and space. In that possibility we escape the now and grant that possibility to be truly possible, at that moment, we are elsewhere.

I am appalled by this phenomenon when common sense would explain that its tautological relationship (this back and forth game of definitions between I and you) is merely an idiotic repetition of one and the same. That I overstate this relationship (the ineffability of your existence birthed by my speech) to the extent of nonsense.

Look at me, I am doing this in your name. I will not fail you and I will survive.

And so we become the ghost of each other, forever circling each other’s heads in the form of a conscience. But I do not know you anymore. Nothing in this world can be defined by the word ‘you’ because the you is always absent. The you is always deferred each time you is put into writing. We address in advance for the you that will never come. When I say ‘you’ I always point to the future possibility of a signified, such as in this epistolary form of writing, you fulfill me when you have read what I have to say. When you receive the voice that is buried by these words, I am manifesting as a ghost of the past in front of a you who I am addressing in the future.

But I can only tell you this: you are still the source of my suffering.

You who is there, presently gazing through my writing, is still the source of my suffering. I summon you from the future as a ghost of what has not happened yet. The possibility of you is what makes this exchange possible. Whereas you who is the source of my suffering is what wounds me in the form of an expectation that is impossible to be fulfilled. You, the future is the source of a past wound that has already inflicted me pain and burden — a wound that is metaphysically absent but phenomenologically present as a scar. You give me a wound that is inevitable, a scar birthed by the tension created between being and non-being. This burden brings my suffering of the existence of you as indeterminate.

What does a wound mean in the context of an utterance? Perhaps, it is voice violently slicing through the air, that I am wounding the space in the form of a series of vibrations and it bleeds through sound. To say, “I am here,” am I more than a murderer of my own body? As if I allow my own body to hollow itself out to connect with someone else’s.

And at this moment, I felt holy in hearing a verse from the gospel of Mark that I keep on hearing during the Catholic Mass:

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22–24).

That I find myself sharing parts of me in the form of communion with a different other. I am wounded in sharing parts of me, a form of inclusion in order to expose your self to others. We can only be seen, touched, perceived through this inevitability of self-inflicted vulnerability. I am wounded in speech. In speaking, I bare myself naked in front of everyone. There is nothing outside of my own body that I can genuinely say is mine. All that is me is a part of my body and nothing else — a theology and cosmology of two.

Or maybe am I wounding my body with every attempt to connect to an Other? I touch someone and I deny myself in the process. I feel myself become transparent along with the Other within empathy and compassion. Momentarily, we become one and connected by the same wound.

Momentarily, wounds exist in a short amount of time until it heals and closes themselves. Once again, I am my body but with a mark of a former wound. When I say “You are here,” it is true before I said it and it becomes a lie once after I say it. I wound before I say what I say and it heals after the words leave my mouth, and in between speech, during my speaking, I disappear to sacrifice my body for the illusion of presence until it becomes a truth of absence.

I feel you. I feel you through this invisible burden. What you communicate to me in your absence is the weight of this belief. That somewhere, sometime in the near future, which is an event that is always before my death, this belief will amount to the sum of the things I had endured. I will reap all of what I had planted before my death. I believe I will be rewarded since I believe willingly and blindly. As what every believer has told themselves as a consolation for nothing. As truth may present me the promise that remains a promise in the form of your own formlessness. I address you now, always, and forever. Tomorrow will come but you have died in the future to deny me that promise as of this moment. I address and you undress. You are there but not, simultaneously. I willfully accept this suffering as an illusion to sustain an idea. I am surrendering to the malevolence of uncertainty.

I pray to you. Suddenly, we become lacking one another. I pray to you not to wish but to speak to you who is inside of me. A you that is alien to everything that I can say is me. A you who is foreign from my own body and its entirety. I pray for you as you exist within a metaphysical distance as a reference for your absence. You are not here nor there so I cannot speak to you. I can speak about you which can summon an absent presence but I pray to speak to you directly in your absence. Since your existence is always deferred, I postpone my speech and withhold my voice into an echo. Internally, I am yours as of this moment.

And you whisper. Only I could hear and no one else. It is a whisper that is directed to me as whispers are intended for a certain audience—someone. I know it is your voice since I do not know you at all. Words do not arrive with a name or a fingerprint. I only believe that it is your whisper in my ear that denies me of any form of recognition. I guess. As wildly as I can but it is a guess that is fueled by desire. A desire that can never be fulfilled. So it clings to every possible opportunity of fulfillment despite every possible disappointment. It is a desperate desire to be desired. There is nothing else that can be revived by your whisper but my longing. Your whispers are our secrets. No one must hear it except us. We are tangled by softly spoken words directed at one another. Tangled but free from every sin as we entangle ourselves with our absence. This space, this empty space where we call ourselves not by our names but our bodies.

I speak to you by touching you temporarily from a distance and our bodies begin to disappear as a consequence of recognition.

Of course, I will always come back to you but only insofar as you wear the clothes of the transcendent signified. You are only you when you are stripped of everything that is you, who becomes everything and everyone at the moment of meaning’s abnegation. We only exist in language and linguistics is the only relationship that connects us. But what about its grammar? What are the disguises that we inhabit to make sense of everything that we have become? What is the structure of your being, the syntax of your voice before you begin to sing? Why are we separated by a space between two words only to fulfill the delivery of thought, idea, into a sentence? What do sentences become if they are not sent and passively suspended in space?

As if when I put myself in the middle of every sentence, I speak and I arrive at Descarte’s cogito. I speak and I cannot deny myself even further. I am far from what I used to be. A word is a step of affirmation for myself that I, who is speaking right now am here, solipsistically speaking, I become a point of origin on an empty plane. And so when I speak of you, I find myself undeniable in relation to you as if I speak and say that you become the opposite of me who is present as you escape from my lips. We become a geometrical figure of a line in a plane: two points of origin in space connected by proximal relationship and we are arbitrarily attached to one another in the language of mathematics.

As if we are two different worlds with no knowledge of the other’s history. We reflect on the Other, halfway as we encounter each other until we put ourselves in the middle of our understanding of the other to situate ourselves within the context of our understanding.

What mediates us is gaze, and that is even an imaginary one such that both of us are performing in the absent gaze of one another. I am looking at you. Even though we are both denied by the physical presence of one another, we can only exist to one another as a hovering presence. Call it the denial of an impossibility because we can never physically meet. However, if there exists a possibility of an encounter for us, it would be an aberration of time and space. In that possibility we escape the now and grant that possibility to be truly possible, at that moment, we are elsewhere.

I am appalled by this phenomenon when common sense would explain that its tautological relationship (this back and forth game of definitions between I and you) is merely an idiotic repetition of one and the same. That I overstate this relationship (the ineffability of your existence birthed by my speech) to the extent of nonsense.

Look at me, I am doing this in your name. I will not fail you and I will survive.

And so we become the ghost of each other, forever circling each other’s heads in the form of a conscience. But I do not know you anymore. Nothing in this world can be defined by the word ‘you’ because the you is always absent. The you is always deferred each time you is put into writing. We address in advance for the you that will never come. When I say ‘you’ I always point to the future possibility of a signified, such as in this epistolary form of writing, you fulfill me when you have read what I have to say. When you receive the voice that is buried by these words, I am manifesting as a ghost of the past in front of a you who I am addressing in the future.

But I can only tell you this: you are still the source of my suffering.

You who is there, presently gazing through my writing, is still the source of my suffering. I summon you from the future as a ghost of what has not happened yet. The possibility of you is what makes this exchange possible. Whereas you who is the source of my suffering is what wounds me in the form of an expectation that is impossible to be fulfilled. You, the future is the source of a past wound that has already inflicted me pain and burden — a wound that is metaphysically absent but phenomenologically present as a scar. You give me a wound that is inevitable, a scar birthed by the tension created between being and non-being. This burden brings my suffering of the existence of you as indeterminate.

What does a wound mean in the context of an utterance? Perhaps, it is voice violently slicing through the air, that I am wounding the space in the form of a series of vibrations and it bleeds through sound. To say, “I am here,” am I more than a murderer of my own body? As if I allow my own body to hollow itself out to connect with someone else’s.

And at this moment, I felt holy in hearing a verse from the gospel of Mark that I keep on hearing during the Catholic Mass:

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22–24).

That I find myself sharing parts of me in the form of communion with a different other. I am wounded in sharing parts of me, a form of inclusion in order to expose your self to others. We can only be seen, touched, perceived through this inevitability of self-inflicted vulnerability. I am wounded in speech. In speaking, I bare myself naked in front of everyone. There is nothing outside of my own body that I can genuinely say is mine. All that is me is a part of my body and nothing else — a theology and cosmology of two.

Or maybe am I wounding my body with every attempt to connect to an Other? I touch someone and I deny myself in the process. I feel myself become transparent along with the Other within empathy and compassion. Momentarily, we become one and connected by the same wound.

Momentarily, wounds exist in a short amount of time until it heals and closes themselves. Once again, I am my body but with a mark of a former wound. When I say “You are here,” it is true before I said it and it becomes a lie once after I say it. I wound before I say what I say and it heals after the words leave my mouth, and in between speech, during my speaking, I disappear to sacrifice my body for the illusion of presence until it becomes a truth of absence.

I feel you. I feel you through this invisible burden. What you communicate to me in your absence is the weight of this belief. That somewhere, sometime in the near future, which is an event that is always before my death, this belief will amount to the sum of the things I had endured. I will reap all of what I had planted before my death. I believe I will be rewarded since I believe willingly and blindly. As what every believer has told themselves as a consolation for nothing. As truth may present me the promise that remains a promise in the form of your own formlessness. I address you now, always, and forever. Tomorrow will come but you have died in the future to deny me that promise as of this moment. I address and you undress. You are there but not, simultaneously. I willfully accept this suffering as an illusion to sustain an idea. I am surrendering to the malevolence of uncertainty.

I pray to you. Suddenly, we become lacking one another. I pray to you not to wish but to speak to you who is inside of me. A you that is alien to everything that I can say is me. A you who is foreign from my own body and its entirety. I pray for you as you exist within a metaphysical distance as a reference for your absence. You are not here nor there so I cannot speak to you. I can speak about you which can summon an absent presence but I pray to speak to you directly in your absence. Since your existence is always deferred, I postpone my speech and withhold my voice into an echo. Internally, I am yours as of this moment.

And you whisper. Only I could hear and no one else. It is a whisper that is directed to me as whispers are intended for a certain audience—someone. I know it is your voice since I do not know you at all. Words do not arrive with a name or a fingerprint. I only believe that it is your whisper in my ear that denies me of any form of recognition. I guess. As wildly as I can but it is a guess that is fueled by desire. A desire that can never be fulfilled. So it clings to every possible opportunity of fulfillment despite every possible disappointment. It is a desperate desire to be desired. There is nothing else that can be revived by your whisper but my longing. Your whispers are our secrets. No one must hear it except us. We are tangled by softly spoken words directed at one another. Tangled but free from every sin as we entangle ourselves with our absence. This space, this empty space where we call ourselves not by our names but our bodies.

I speak to you by touching you temporarily from a distance and our bodies begin to disappear as a consequence of recognition.