his last letter. now that i think of it, he was the only one i knew who still wrote letters. people now write emails or don't write at all which honestly for most of them is already too much, lost as they appear when i utter the word grammar, mouth agape and eyes drooling with pus. and when i think that i feel very old, older than he was perhaps, older than he felt no doubt, old because i am putting myself on the old pedestal of those elders who know best. but really if language and expression does not have to be precise or exact anymore, perhaps i am the one who is wrong and perhaps this new plasticity will be good for all in the long run. perhaps language should not be precisely formed but precisely felt and perhaps muted tones and subtle variations on vague themes are what people need to express themselves now, perhaps everything is now so vague and undiscernible that precision would not do to describe their world. perhaps smudges of mixed colors express what they have at their core better than the fine scripts of my youth - and when do we really ever get passed youth? never, as far as i can tell. i hang on to it desperately, to everything it has meant once and still could mean today, to every shred of knowledge i had gathered and adhered to, to every little inkling of a feeling, as if youth had made it fresh and new and whole and, well, true. as if all that, youth and dream and my fingers' close tight grip on it all could be anything but an illusion. but illusions hang back if you hold them too near and they can become a most welcome companion on roads that seem like those is cheap horror movies, with black trees swinging their boughs and bright green eyes of unseen creatures flashing and vanishing and winds howling through the dying flesh of hanged men and birds cawing with a taste for bloody limbs torn and fallen to the ground. with a good enough illusion by your side you can go through those woods and come back out on the other side, or perhaps a third side, since the paths in there seem misleading, whether they take you where you wanted to go or where, really, you should be. and the illusion knows to take you to where you should go, and if you listened it would be easy but you think you have your own answers so you trudge on, but unbeknownst to you, you will still end up in precisely the ditch you deserved, the one that you can follow to come out ahead in the end. through the grime, the illusion will take you, but if your fingers are strong enough and your grip is relentless and you are able to abandon your will by the side of the road as you should, then it will raise you again to heights you had never imagined. and if, like me, you suffer from uncontrollable unquenchable unusable vertigo, well, hang on, because you'll need to get down somehow, and by your own means. one way to do that is to give it all up, open your fingers wide, let it go, and let yourself fall. i guess you could climb down as well. but if you can you don't know vertigo. vertigo fights with the illusion, and really that's all there is to life - a fight between vertigo and illusion, and the winner takes all, all that is and was you, and all you ever will be. but again, such is only my own story. when i look into eyes as i walk to places, definitely keeping myself at the bottom of the valley and my fingers wide and empty, i see nothing to reflect my own path or my own vertigo. i see windows turned to the inside, some with shutters closed tight and securely locked, others without, but no mirror, no indication that the other is my brother, my kin, my flesh. brain waves are apparently confined to the cranium. well sometimes i wish for a hole in that box, a tiny hole perhaps, but enough to get the light in and enough to reach out into other cerebral homes. when i was nine i tried to punch the hole in myself. that got me sent away for a while, sent away to people who only wanted what was best for me and only wanted to help and if i'd only stay still and listen i'd see they were doing all this for me and if i'd just shut up and listen i'd see their love and understanding. when i shut up and looked into their boarded-up shutters, i knew i was really alone. not that they were lying, mind you, they really thought they could should would help, but they were not me and it was as clear to me as if a star had shone bright enough to cut through all the hospital floors above me, through the concrete and the patients' bodies and the bed and vials and electronic equipment and pill bottles and gowns and sickly green surfaces. they were not me. they wanted to get inside my head too, but not to let the light in, no, just so they could understand the other. i understood that need, that drive, but i also understood that my exposed cerebellum would only show them some of themselves, as they were simply only ready to get more understanding about themselves, though they were going about it in a strange way - to me, anyway - and were somewhat deluded. deluded is what they called me, too. i was glad. it was better than what they called that other kid, the one who had bitten off his mother's nose in her sleep. i saw her too, once, when she came to visit him. i was half hoping to see a gaping hole in her face and i wondered whether that opening had helped her understand everything better, but they had already reworked her face to give her a new one and she had something serving as a nose, although i did not dare to ask whether it was prosthetic or something they had cooked together using old flesh and fat from her left buttock. in any case at some point they dismissed me as a lost cause and i was glad that they had a label for me that allowed me to go back home and eat ants in peace again in the very back of the rose garden, behind the little half-thrown down stone wall that my friend's mother's aunt had once wanted to have sex on with that tall elegant stranger she had brought home as a medal. of course they had no idea i was anywhere around or she would have liked the privacy of the gazebo better. or perhaps not. she seemed, even to me then, as a generally fucked up person. but then again, who am i to talk? see, i understand the youth's point - sometimes language, precise as it was designed to be, is a trap, and i want to talk about me and i end up speaking about you, an undefined, undeniable you, and then i finish up by making judgements about other people's brain waves in a way that is completely ridiculous and contrary to my belief that i only can know myself, and not very well at that. language and habits thereof can cloud reality and that is why perhaps the young have it all right, and should be left alone to create a language more suitable for these fluxing days.