Dear B

The book is almost completed. The final chapter will remain interrupted. It ends suddenly like a French movie de la Nouvelle Vague, leaving most viewers in an uneasy silence.

Hiroshima, mon amour never ended in my mind. The black and white images are still vivid. She is remembering and He is trying to refute everything She says until it ends abruptly without warning,

like all love stories between a man and a woman,

dull and predictable.

 Just as in love, there is this illusion, this illusion that you will never be able to forget, the way I had the illusion, faced with Hiroshima that I would never forget. Just as in love.

  

This book is not a love story between a man and a woman interrupting each other.  

It is raining outside and all I am thinking is how to leave this place.

This book has all the questions

I was able to finish it because nobody was correcting while I was writing.

It might hurt some and disappoint others. But what counts is how it will affect you.

Time will pass. Only time. And time will come. A time will come, when we can no longer name what it is that unites us. The name will gradually fade from our memory. Then it will disappear entirely.

I wrote the stories in the book over and over for you, as the only reader.

I will publish one copy of the book. You will read it and others will hear a version of your interpretation, since the original will be nowhere to be found except in your library.

The original story will have no sense without your interpretation and what you make of it is crucial.

It is a love story between a woman writing the story and the other woman reading it, and their union is not essential. It is written in several languages, some recreated in the process, in an unacceptable grammar and incomprehensible tournures de phrase.

I have made nothing up.

You have made it all up.

Others will write a literary critique around it, through your quotations, without ever reading the original. The original has no value. The value relies on how you describe it to others, what meaning you give to each chapter and in which language you translate the most terrible silences in between the pages.

I am not writing this book in English.

You saw nothing in Hiroshima.

The book is a love story, a fiction, like a black and white vintage movie with no storyline. It has a series of disturbing images. It contains graphic visuals and explicit sexuality of two women reading a coffee cup,

not suitable for sensitive audience members with a degree in Literature.

Anonymous locks of hair that Hiroshima's women, when they awoke, discovered had fallen out.

You should start reading it from the last chapter. The last chapter will not be included in the book but you will find decent translations of it on Google translate.

You could start in the middle as well. As long as you are not starting from the first chapter, you can survive the story.

I keep translating these words from French, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish…

I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love?

The woman sitting in the café and smoking endlessly, near the Hrabarak seems completely devastated. She is waiting for someone, forever. She is crying but you can’t see her tears.

The illusion, quite simply, is so perfect, that tourists weep. It's easy to be cynical. But what else can a tourist possibly do, but weep?

Tears that come from a deep pain remain trapped somehow between those pages, unseen.

I was tempted to give her my only copy of the book.

But she couldn’t understand the love story. She needed a storyline with a man and a woman, interrupting each other.

I will send you the book and then disappear. Once you have read it, there is no more reason for me to exist.

Like you, I have fought with all my might not to forget. Like you, I have forgotten.

The letters will remain in the book. You can rearrange the order with each reading.

I'm beginning to forget you. Forgetting so much love is terrifying.

This is not the ending. There are no endings in this love story.

I am writing these letters to document love.

L.