You said that some of the days you treasure most are rainy ones. Staying indoors, listening to the sound of rain, reading, watching films, quietly existing. Just imagining a scene like that awakens endless memories in me. It feels as though moments like those contain everything about a person, both the visible and the invisible.Right now I’m lying in bed, looking at the wire hanging from the corner of the wall, and somehow it gives me the feeling of something eternal, something permanent. Lying on my side like this, I imagine the way you move through your memories. I’m deeply fascinated by the way you speak about them. Your memories sound so precise, as though you could remember the exact date of a rainy afternoon, or the way the humidity in a room touched your skin and made you feel strangely sensitive, strangely alive.
What fascinates me most is this almost unbelievable ability you seem to have when remembering, because it feels completely opposite to my own. If memory existed on some kind of spectrum, perhaps I would stand at one end and you at the other. I’m not entirely sure what feeling that creates in me. Every act of remembering feels like rewriting one’s own past, and in that process something new always seems to grow.I often fail to remember the exact people or objects from other time-space. I forget big piece of skies, houses and faces. Only the sensation of dampness remains, endlessly seeping through dark spaces.
Perhaps because of this, I gradually learned how to live with the blur of memory, with its instability and uncertainty. Life itself has felt uncertain to me most of the time, and yet my childhood unfolded inside an environment of almost complete certainty. As I grew older, I slowly became used to finding my own place within uncertainty, somewhere inside a crowd, maintaining a distance where others can still see me without ever coming too close. I think that’s because I so often feel at a loss. And when you describe and capture my nervousness or moments of panic so precisely, it creates an intimacy that almost overwhelms me.
I imagine our memories of our first meeting must be completely different. I only remember a pale figure passing beside me. Everyone was seriously focused on discussing something, and you moved past me almost like a passerby before sitting somewhere behind me. And that day at Sol’s house, you barely spoke at first. Just as you later described it yourself, it felt as though you were trying to soften your own presence, to hide yourself. At the time I hadn’t yet realized that this was such a cat-like quality. I was trying very hard then to become more socially present, because at that moment it felt necessary, even important. But I would never say that quickly interacting with people or becoming close to them is something comfortable for me.
We barely spoke that day, almost no direct conversation at all. And I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point, when I looked at you, everyone else’s voices seemed to fade. Perhaps it was your gaze that drew me in. I began noticing you, sensing something unusual about you, paying closer attention to your words, your gestures, your eyes. I think it came from curiosity. I’m drawn to people who share certain traits with me, or people who somehow stand out within a crowd.
Do you know that in East Asia there are countless myths about foxes? Their image changes constantly throughout folklore. The most mysterious appearance of a fox I’ve ever seen was in Kurosawa’s Dreams. The dream also begins on a rainy day, though a strange one: sunlight and rain existing together, what people call a sunshower. In that kind of weather, foxes hold weddings.
In the dream, a little boy is warned by his mother that foxes dislike humans witnessing their wedding. They dislike being watched. They dislike being seen. Yet the boy still walks into the forest, moving between enormous trees, entering the foxes’ world, hiding behind the trunks to secretly observe their ceremony.
That scene has always felt deeply strange to me. Why did the boy enter the forest? Was it curiosity? Was he drawn toward something mysterious and unfamiliar? Or did it happen accidentally? In the dream, the boy suffers severe consequences, and yet the film gives the fox an image of otherness that feels almost desirable.
And somehow, I feel that I might be that fox. And you, although not the little boy but rather a black cat, I still hope you won’t wander too easily into the deepest part of the forest.
At the end of this letter, I want to write about the most beautiful storm I’ve ever experienced. It happened at the Phenomenon cinema in Barcelona, during a screening at the DA Film Festival. The film was April, a Georgian film, and at the beginning I listened to several uninterrupted minutes of torrential rain. That feeling is something I don’t think I’ll ever experience in quite the same way again.
P.S. I received your letter right on time. It’s just that this fox writes much more slowly than you imagined, so please be a little patient with her. And somehow, seeing you through a letter feels very warm.