[c=#2dba69]The Fragments of Erdos - Part 2
The Unanswered Letter[/c]

[c=#a8c8e8][i]I wrote so many letters that never had a recipient. And yet, I never stopped writing.[/i][/c]

I often wondered, in my loneliest years - and nearly all of them were, if I'm honest with myself - whether it was better to disappear completely: leave no trace at all, like a question one never asked aloud, as though one had only ever existed as an absence, a hollow left behind. Or to leave behind a doubt, something vague enough that people would still wonder, long after, whether one had truly searched for what one believes one remembers searching for. I ended up choosing the shadow that leaves an imprint. I couldn't say whether it was out of pride, or some late tenderness toward those who would come after me, retracing the same paths without knowing they had already been walked.

I slept, during that period, in more abandoned barns than I could count, under the porches of villages whose people had long since stopped believing the stories told about the man who spoke to empty places. I was chased off, sometimes, politely or less so depending on the place. I never held it against them. A man who prefers deserted halls to full taverns always ends up unsettling someone, one way or another, and I couldn't blame them for a caution I might well have shared myself, in their place.

Abandoned places do not speak the way one speaks to the living. They say nothing clear, never a whole sentence one could report as such to anyone willing to believe it - only murmurs, vague sensations one takes years to learn to recognize. A heaviness to the air in one particular corner of a room, with no draft to explain it. And sometimes, if one stays still long enough that the legs grow numb and time itself seems to hesitate before continuing, a suspended note that no ordinary ear recognizes, but which the body, somehow, seems to perceive before the mind does.

It was with my bone flute that I began to understand these notes, hall after hall, season after season, crossing lands whose borders I've since forgotten, forests nearly swallowed whole by moss, plains so vast the wind seemed to circle endlessly for lack of anything to break against. Not to invent them: to recover them, the way one recovers a word stuck on the tip of the tongue without ever quite managing to say it, that bittersweet frustration that only gives way after hours, sometimes entire days.

Every abandoned place seems to carry, buried somewhere beneath its silence, a sequence that belongs to it alone - and which it has waited, sometimes for centuries, to have played back to it, patiently, without tiring of failure, again and again, with that quiet stubbornness only forgotten places seem to fully possess.

I never managed to hear it in full, this sequence that obsessed me without my truly knowing why, this melody that seemed to precede me wherever I went, as though it had chosen my road before I ever chose it myself. Only fragments, torn out one at a time at different hours, in places that sometimes had nothing in common but their solitude and the forgetting that ate away at them. But I sealed them, with care, into the lost parchments you are beginning to understand - not to keep them for myself, but because I knew, I believe, without ever quite putting it into words, that I would never finish this work alone.

What you have consumed so far was not a simple experience of reading. It was a trace, a step of another that you now carry with you, somewhere beneath your own memory, without it ever quite belonging to you, like a borrowed garment still holding the shape of shoulders that aren't your own. If you feel a slight tension, something like a thread stretched between two points you cannot see, that is normal. That is the bond stretching between you and what once was, between your presence and my absence.

Go on, if you have the patience for it - and I know, having so often lacked it myself, how easily it can slip away right when it's needed most. If you find another fragment, consume it without too much hesitation. The thread leads somewhere - I never knew where it stopped in my lifetime, and I doubt I will ever know for certain, even now.
