July
He said the word random as if it was a compliment. It wasn’t an insult either, not entirely; rather it meant he had decided not to listen. It is a way of being to greet things outside of the own rhythm by naming them accidents and I wondered how many times he had changed color. Words interested him as texture, not as meaning. When he spoke, he smiled to erase precision, and he appeared detached even when surrounded by friends.
The next day at the beach he didn’t swim. In the middle of noise he created silence that appeared to shelter him. Surrounded by people, he seemed intent on proving isolation, the solitude looked deliberate, almost staged. There was something childlike about him that didn’t cancel out calculation. He seemed to know the effect of his stillness. The gesture had the precision of theatre, but no visible spectator; it looked like a performance that demanded to be seen, though it was unclear by whom. The desire appeared not acting, but to author, perhaps for the part of him that watched from elsewhere. He neither listened nor spoke, smiling only when context required it, his gaze moving across the sand like a camera in search of its frame. There was something deliberate in that sereneness. His presence moved unfree, his gaze lingered too long on bodies; it had the accuracy of someone accustomed to consuming images. He seemed to register the scene, who moved, who remained still, as though, in his perception, another version of the moment was unfolding parallel to ours, creating the same instant but edited into a different sequence, in one that feeds his own memory rather than a collective one. In a universe that is continuous, where all is one, separation survives only as narrative. The story we tell to keep ourselves distinct from what we observe is the prison that mutes our senses, it is the illusion that lets us watch, though never entirely experience from within. He appeared unaware that his gaze was a gesture in itself, that visibility moves both ways. All is one, but he didn't want to be part of it, although there is no way to escape the wholeness. When laughter broke the surface of the group, he turned aside, performing restraint as if it were elegance. I could feel that he wanted to be seen, that he felt like it was meant to be noticed. All is one, and he was no one aside. I joined him in his soleness, and when I mentioned performance, he spoke about TikTok. It didn’t matter what I had said; in his face I saw that he spoke only for his own record. The words came without kindness or reflection, a sequence of ironies designed to lift him above the conversation. I let him. He seemed proud of the sound of his thoughts, indifferent to whether they would take root in another mind. It felt like watching a language that moves outward but never touches. He treated exchange as display, not as dialogue, maybe as an opportunity to compose himself in front of witnesses. His attention shifted quickly from idea to self-presentation, from conversation to posture. He created the impression of depth by withholding explanation. I left. 

 

   August
Although he had been described to me in great detail before I had met him the very first time, when I arrived at the van, no one had mentioned that he would be the first person I’d see. I said hello, he didn't ask how I was. His presence unsettled me, and I excused myself by buying tobacco and an apple. Surprisingly, though he seemed uncomfortable too, he decided to join me. We didn't look at each other when walking and between us stretched a big distance. On the way he told a story from his childhood, about an accident, the kind that leaves a trace of shame for years. It was disguised as a memory of the country I had been born in and he said it lightly, as if it were a comic anecdote, but the precision of his phrasing betrayed rehearsal. I didn't interpret it as a confession, it was a choreography; the kind of small ritual that people invent to prove that what once hurt them now belongs to them. The story itself wasn’t about the accident. It was about control and it was supposed to show me how he was able to control his own narrative. He performed his humiliation before anyone else could discover it, transforming what had once been weakness into authorship. It was a gesture of pre-emptive possession, as though he needed to own every version of himself before the world could interpret it. I wondered where he had the impression from that I drew a picture about him, and I wondered why he felt the need of repainting what he thought I created. He seemed like a man that performs shame to neutralize it, a man that offers a minor humiliation, a small self-exposure, in order to appear fearless. Freedom from shame though rarely announces itself and to speak of it without hesitation to a stranger is just another way of keeping it close. What begins as vulnerability becomes theatre, and theatre becomes protection and this protection made him look adolescent, hurt. It looked like this instinct had become a structure, the same one that shaped his irony and detachment. He didn’t confess; he produced content, and although he spoke all the path, he didn't say anything. The experience reached me edited, it felt honest but artificial. His sincerity wasn't false per se, rather it was a managed method to ensure that nothing real could wound him. Even tenderness, in him, seemed to exist under supervision. So I bought him candy. And for a moment the theatre paused, became almost transparently innocent, full of the wish to be forgiven for needing to be seen. During the three hours in the car, he said almost nothing. When we arrived at the campsite, he said nothing. He built his tent quickly, carefully, a small architecture of distance. Around him, his friends laughed, called his name, tried to draw him in, but he stayed apart, as though proximity itself were exhausting. Even among them, he was alone. They spoke to him like people speaking toward a mirror, hoping for reflection. I wondered if that was simply his way, if also them were in need o being seen, I wondered if it was a practice of distance with everyone, to stay unreachable even to those closest. We played who am I, and I remember thinking that nothing is fitting more accurate. I let him be Heisenberg, and I reflected about the impact of my choice, if he would understand that I chose it for a reason. Control through uncertainty, a human hiding behind ambiguity. Every statement he makes is reversible, every emotion rehearsed, every confession pre-owned, I didn't say that. It seemed like it was either his presence or his honestly that could be measured, but never both. His entire personality expressed itself to me like a quantum field: anything could be true, but nothing can be pinned down.
The air was soft that morning, the kind that makes every sound smaller. He was quiet, not from modesty but from fatigue, as if speech itself weighed too much. When he did speak, his voice seemed borrowed from somewhere else, already half-absent before it reached an ear. When I came back from the lake the others gathered on a carpet, and though he sat near, he didn’t join. His silence no longer felt superior; it felt almost protective, as though something fragile depended on it and I wondered if he was exhausted. That morning he looked more at shapes than at people, his gaze moving as if to measure the outline of things rather than their meaning. I questioned if he knew that he, too, was being observed. The stillness about him no longer seemed deliberate, it wasn't purity either, but a temporary forgetting of performance. For a while he appeared harmless, almost gentle, like a child on the verge of sleep. He occupied himself with my notebook, turning the pages with a care that seemed too careful, as if memorizing a language he didn’t yet speak. Later he scrolled through the photographs on my phone, pausing, studying, not to discover but to confirm. I let him. It wasn’t curiosity I saw in his face, but recognition; the calm of someone who finds an image of himself in what belongs to another. I went to the van and lay down; the night before I had slept in a hammock. I am not sure if I slept, but at a point I felt his gaze on me. I kept my eyes closed, allowing it to rest. When I opened them, he was still watching, not caring that I discovered him but his attention appeared so patient, it erased intention. I realized that I had become part of his imagination, less a person than an arrangement in his mind. The silence between us thickened, not empty and not disembodied, but charged with what neither of us would name, because there was nothing to say. I didn’t enjoy it because I felt naked, it reached me, and it was enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He does not play an instrument. He says he works with sound.
When he speaks about it, the words slide past each other — texture, grain, rawness — all air. What he really does is collect the breath of others. He records people without telling them, cuts their laughter, their coughs, the ambient hum of waiting rooms. He builds tracks from these leftovers and calls it music.

He says he loves fragments, that he believes in the democracy of sound. I think he believes in theft.

At night, he sits in front of the screen with headphones on, arranging pieces of the world until the world sounds like him. There is a short rhythm he stole from a woman who used to sleep beside him. He has forgotten that it came from her, or maybe he hasn’t — it’s difficult to tell where his forgetting begins.

He looks poor. Torn socks, the same sweater, the smell of smoke. But the poverty is a costume; his family owns vineyards, houses, foundations. He performs the aesthetics of exhaustion — a camouflage of sincerity. It works: people think he is pure, radical, unspoiled by comfort.

He tells me that sound is political, that the smallest click of a lighter contains history. When I ask whose history, he smiles, as if history is a shared inheritance, not something his ancestors purchased and exported.

Once he said, “Noise is the only honest thing left.”
I thought: it’s also the easiest thing to imitate.

That evening, I listen to one of his compositions. The title is Interlude. It begins with a woman’s breath — not singing, not speaking, just breathing.
He says it came from a field recording in Portugal.
I know it is me.

He doesn’t play an instrument. He works with recorded sound.
He calls it collecting; sometimes archiving.
Most of what he uses comes from people he knows — conversations, background hum, voices in transit.
He edits for hours and later says he doesn’t remember where each sound came from.

He speaks about his work as if it were ethics: fragments, equality of sources, the right of everything to be heard.
When he says everything, I think he means everyone else.

At night he sits by the screen, headphones on.
From the corridor I can hear the loop: breath, silence, breath.
He says it is a field recording.
I remember the day we recorded it.

His socks are torn, his shirts grey from washing.
He looks like someone surviving.
He isn’t. His family owns a vineyard near Avignon.
Once he told me that poverty helps him think clearly; that comfort makes people less honest.
I didn’t answer.

He says noise is what remains after truth.
The track is called Interlude.
It opens with breathing and ends before anything begins.

 

We met at the end of the month, during the heat that makes every surface hum. I had driven one of his friends to the festival, someone too drunk to arrive by himself. Max 

That night the air was thick with sound checks and smoke. The two of them, the friend and him, drifted around me with the slow curiosity of people measuring distance. Later I understood it was a contest, though no one said so. When the friend stumbled away, it was Max who stayed.

We decided to camp by the sea. The next day, we built small things: a tower of stones, a pattern in the sand. He treated the world as if it were fragile. I thought he looked like a boy who had never been left alone. When he spoke, it was with a kind of pause before each word, as if language had to be negotiated every time.

At night, I pretended to sleep. He watched me for a long time, thinking I didn’t see. The light from his phone cut a thin line across the fabric of the tent. In the morning, I noticed he had gathered pieces of driftwood into a shape I couldn’t name — something between a nest and a trap.

It was all brief. I organised a small party because we had spoken about meeting again, and when he came, he looked both present and far away. The next morning he left the country. Before leaving, we slept together, though it felt less like a decision and more like an afterthought, a way of closing a moment before it could become a story.

When he packed his things, I followed him to his apartment and left my key there by mistake. A week later, he wrote that he would return. I didn’t know then that his return had nothing to do with me. Still, the key was there, waiting — a small object connecting two unrelated movements, like proof that coincidence can masquerade as fate.

 

He said the word random as if it were a compliment.
He often spoke like that — with a small smile that erased precision.

At the festival he moved among people as if he didn’t belong to any of them, yet wanted to be seen by everyone. When his friend drank too much, he watched in silence, his hands in the pockets of his linen trousers. Later they quarrelled, half in French, half in English, about who would “try.”

He was twenty-two, slender, polite, careless. His way of touching objects was exact, almost feminine. He had a way of lowering his eyes before speaking, as though embarrassed by thought itself.

At the campsite he built small things with the sand — walls, rooms, lines. He said it was to understand scale. At night, he stayed awake after the others had fallen asleep. His body didn’t move, but his gaze did.

There was something childlike about him that didn’t cancel out calculation. He seemed to know the effect of his stillness.

He spoke very little about himself. When asked, he redirected questions with others: And you?, What do you believe in?, Do you lie when you talk about love?
He listened as if listening were work.

He left the country two days later. Before leaving, he packed slowly, checking each object twice. He said he hated departure but always travelled light.

A week later, he returned. Not for anyone, just for unfinished business.
That would become his pattern: leaving as gesture, returning as coincidence, never consequence.