Echoing

We have spilled much ink, you and I, in our discussion of human connection, and we're no closer to understanding than we were when our correspondence began. I often feel as if I am standing on one side of a wide chasm, shouting across, and wondering if the response I hear comes from you, or if it is my own voice, echoing back to me. It seems to me, on my side of the canyon, the search for unity with another is the font of much of the world's unhappiness. I watch as Daisuken, eager as ever to extract some meaning from the prevailing social conventions, endures a series of curated mating rituals. It seems to me that she's incrementally... less content each time she returns from one. I conduct myself as though I'm above matters of the heart, chiefly because I have seen them corrode people I respect. But in my candid moments, I sometimes wonder if I take the stance I do because "love", for lack of a better word, is a game I fail to understand, and so I opt not to play. After all, if I truly had the purity of all my convictions, I wouldn't regret so many of the things I've done, nor would I persist against many of my better instincts in this correspondence. I find you a challenge; one that, in spite of all that you've done, continues to stimulate. And so the conversation - futile though it may finally be - continues. And we are left to wonder, have we simply failed to find the answers to the questions that preoccupy us, or can they not be answered at all? Fortunately for both of us, the world always presents the next diversion, the next elaborate distraction from the problems that vex.