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 around himself. Surrounded by people, he seemed intent on proving isolation, the solitude looked deliberate, almost staged. The gesture had the precision of theatre, but no visible spectator; the desire appeared to be not to act, but to author the scene. It looked like a performance that demanded to be seen, though it was unclear by whom; 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 his stillness. 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 another sequence, in one that feeds his own memory of himself 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, 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. 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. 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

≈

The air was soft that morning, the kind that makes every sound smaller. We went camping, his friends and mine, carrying food and mismatched blankets. He was quiet, not out of modesty but as if sound itself were too heavy to use. When he spoke, his voice seemed borrowed from somewhere else, already faint before it reached us. He helped pitch the tent without instruction, precise and unhurried. Around him, people joked, drank, shouted across the field. He didn’t join, but his silence didn’t feel superior this time. It felt almost gentle, as though he was protecting something small inside it.

When the fire began to burn low, he sat apart, watching the shapes of the flames more than the people near them. There was something unguarded in his stillness, like the stillness of a child before sleep — not pure, exactly, but without performance. For a while he seemed to forget himself.

Later he found my notebook. He didn’t ask; he opened it and read.
He turned the pages slowly, lips moving as if reading aloud to himself. Then he looked through the photographs on my phone, pausing, studying, not searching for anything in particular. I didn’t stop him. It wasn’t curiosity I saw in his face, but recognition — the calm of someone who has found a reflection.

In that quiet, I felt that he wanted to be seen by something larger than any person could offer. He watched the world in hope that it would look back. Tenderness, in him, was not a feeling but a method — a way to exist without claiming.

That night, he barely slept. When I woke, his eyes were open, fixed on me with an attention so patient it seemed to erase intention. I understood then that I had become his image, a thing inside his imagination more than beside him. He didn’t move, and I didn’t speak. The silence between us grew dense, not empty but full of meaning neither of us would name.

 

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.