Dear X. …

For years we corresponded. Sometimes many letters, one day a day, and at other times, none; weeks and months passed, years passed: nothing. But it would begin again all at once – suddenly, when a letter came which began, Dear X.

We wrote of this or that, mundane events, thoughts, hopes, desires. Of this or that, but isn’t that to say: of nothing? Then we wrote to greet each other by way of writing; wrote to greet the absent friend.

But that is not it. There is also the gift of writing, which speaks by saying nothing. Cold gift: gift that gives itself. Writing spoke, and it was no longer your address, or mine.

Dear X. … Dear X.: so did writing, the ‘there is’ of writing, come towards each of us. So did it come, in letters that grew shorter and more inconsequential, that writing which spoke only of itself, but which had no ‘itself’, and was always to come.

Writing came, drawing itself back from what was written. Drew it back, and let it speak in this withdrawal, interrupting us by letting our words sink back into themselves. Our words? But what did they matter, when they were bowed by writing like grass in the wind?

You were there before us, writing. You set yourself into that ‘before’ as soon as we wrote, as we began to write. You came forward when the words sank from us on the page. And now friendship changed. Friendship was drawn from itself. Who were we, you – then me? Who, each of us, joined, unjoined by what spoke between us?

Who spoke? Was it you, writing? But you never said anything. You never said a thing. Unless it is that you spoke by what we wrote, that your saying passed through our written words to unwrite them in turn.

Could we say we suffered you? We suffered; that was the content of our friendship. You gave yourself movement, passing from the one to the other, each time unilateral. But that was your weakness: you needed us, and you needed our writing.

Weakness: you could never remain in tautology. You, who could not act, needed someone else to act, and we were your proxies. You spoke, and we were the echo of your speech. We wrote, and you wrote by way of our writing. You gave writing to us, on condition that no one was there to receive it. And didn’t you give us friendship, too?

Dear X.: X. stands for that friendship as much as for the friend. Dear X.: call of a writing that stands, each time, outside each of us. Outside: as though each of us, writing, were only the passage of writing, what it is when it is nothing yet. Outside: but now our friendship, too, is outside, and who were we but the points of its turning?

You were silence, the placekeeper of silence. The placekeeper? But you had no place; we gave you a place to take, each time. ‘No one’: relata of our friendship. You – then me. Me – then you: each of us addressed, each of us was X., the addressed and then, in turn, X. who wrote, and was written.

Perhaps it was this which kept us writing long after we had forgotten one another. And wasn’t it, then, after this forgetting, that writing became easier? Me – then you. You – then me, and each of us X., named, unnamed by writing.