I sit here, night after night, pouring myself into the cracks of history, bathing in obscure knowledge for the sake of trying to aquire some sort of superiority. Pointless. I've been burying myself in dusty scraps of information since I was a boy, and none of it has prepared me for you. You throw the beauty of an experience across my shoulders like a blanket and I shrug it off with mere facts and annotations, as if I'm afraid of what it would mean to accept the simplicity of you reaching out to me, not to explain but to share. The simple fact is that I withdrew from things a very long time ago and now I don't know how to come back. Always I must explain and analyze, pry up old tombstones thinking that if I can only find some kind of secret that I'd be able to step back into life. You told me that I hold too much back. You're right. I hold most everything back, bury it in the mass grave where I dumped the corpses of many selves. I don't know how to participate in life anymore, only to observe and calculate. And I'm afraid that if I can't figure out how to change that, it will strangle us.