By Nuoya Li 

An Overture in Letters  

We were never supposed to meet. Or perhaps, we were always meant to. 

Our worlds—parallel in intellect and privilege—had little reason to intersect. I, an economist  turned ballerina and art gallerist, with a past in AI consulting, a present shaped by movement and  creation. He, a philosopher wrapped in law and business, drawn to the elegance of old-world  aspirations. 

Yet the improbable happened. 

It began not with a fleeting gaze across a crowded room, nor with hands brushing together in  some serendipitous moment of fate—but with words. 

The first letter arrived in the epiphany season, carrying reflections on the sublime—on  imagination, beauty, and the tension between art and logic. 

“There is a depth and darkness to such pursuits that is not so easily emulated in the routine of a  repetitive AI world.” 

His words were carefully chosen, deliberate. A man accustomed to precision yet yearning for  something beyond structure. 

I read his letter slowly, then again, absorbing the weight of his questions. In response, I explored  the interplay of music and memory, the impermanence of art, and the way meaning flickers  before slipping away. 

“Life unfolds like music, with twelve notes dancing around each other, sometimes following a  directed choreography and other times not.” 

He replied within hours. 

“It is such a privilege to be exposed to this melody and embrace it. Your precious pursuits in  literature fashion your mind to the same excitements I describe here.” 

There was a rhythm to it. A dance. Thoughts exchanged with increasing fervor, letters giving  way to hour-long calls. We spoke in the kind of unguarded intimacy that exists only in rare  moments of alignment. We were building something—an architecture of ideas, of philosophy, of  shared admiration for the ineffable.

And then came the invitation. London. A celebration. A reason to step beyond words and into  life itself. 

I hesitated only for a moment before booking my flight. 

Birthday Evening 

The invitation carried an unspoken weight. 

It wasn’t just an offer to celebrate my birthday. It was an extension of everything we had  discussed—the letters, the ideals, the shared vision of something beyond the ordinary. 

London awaited, and with it, Clemens. 

I arrived on a crisp winter afternoon, and he greeted me, poised and composed, his gaze  softening when it met mine. 

This was the third time we had met in person. And yet, standing before him, I felt none of the  distance that time or familiarity should have dictated. Instead, there was quiet certainty. 

That evening, we waltzed into a world of velvet and candlelight—a private club, its walls lined  with books and history. It was a place of refined indulgence, where conversations unfolded with  precision and the clinking of glasses felt almost ceremonial. 

“You must give a toast,” our mutual friend declared, raising her glass expectantly. I had not prepared for this. But then again, wasn’t this entire visit a leap into the unscripted? 

I stood in the room, pausing, momentarily caught off guard by the moment. The words surfaced  as if they had always resided in some hidden corner of my mind. 

I spoke of the rare beauty of being in London, of celebrating among those who understood that  life was meant to be lived intensely. 

I spoke of Clemens. 

He beamed at my spontaneous speech, his eyes unreadable yet intent. 

And when I sat down, as the room erupted in applause, he leaned in—closer than before, his  voice just above a whisper. 

“That was eloquent,” he said.

The night swirled on—wine, laughter, undercurrents of the unspoken but undeniable. And then,  as the last coats were gathered, he took my hand as conversations faded into the London air. 

Near the coat rack, away from the eyes of the room, he kissed me. 

Not with hesitation, nor with a grand declaration—only with inevitability. 

Outside, the city hummed, innocent. The streets stretched ahead, endless, and full of possibility. From the shadows of a quiet side street, a tubby cat with fur the color of cream padded toward  us. We would call her Blanca as if she had carried the name all along.  

“No repercussions—at least not yet. Before you move here.” The words lingered, unguarded,  almost childlike. 

And I knew, then, that something had shifted. 

The Morning Light & Intellectual Refuge 

The city was still wrapped in winter fog the morning after the celebration. 

Golden light spilled through the windows of his apartment, shifting softly across the walls. The  air smelled of fresh coffee, a warmth against the cold beyond the glass. 

He had rushed outside twice that morning, returning with the exact breakfast he knew I  preferred. 

“You need a real breakfast,” he had said, his voice carrying the quiet authority of someone who  cared in ways he never had to articulate. 

There was something deeply intimate in how he moved around the kitchen—not performative,  but instinctive, as if he had already memorized the smallest details of my habits, my preferences,  my ways. 

The room was small but filled with stories. 

A French horn rested by the window, its brass gleaming in the morning light. Beside it, a Mozart  concerto lay open, as if waiting for his return. 

On the table, a printout—an article about a pianist who had started serious training in her thirties. “I thought you’d find this inspiring,” he had said, handing it to me over coffee. And I did.

Over dark espresso, we sifted through a curated collection of articles saved over the years  from The New Yorker and London Review of Books—pieces on literature, politics, lifestyle, and  travel. Stories that had lingered, resurfacing at odd moments, like echoes of conversations  unfinished. 

It felt easy, like something we had always done. Like something we would always do. And yet, the weight of reality had begun to settle in the spaces between the lines. 

The Musicians’ Residence 

The British Museum felt cavernous in the afternoon light, its great stone columns stretching  skyward as if trying to touch the past. 

I wandered alone through halls of marble and glass, letting the hush of history settle around me. 

I sent Clemens an image—a Picasso sketch, raw and unfinished, his relentless pursuit of form  and expression evident in every restless stroke. 

“Isn’t this what we all try to do?” I thought. “Capture what can’t be kept?” 

Later, I found myself at Handel & Hendrix House, a hidden corner of the city where two  composers—separated by centuries—had unknowingly shared the same walls. 

It was one of Clemens’ favorite museums, though I hadn’t known that when I chose it. 

Handel’s clavichord sat untouched in a room where the air still carried the ghost of music. The  walls whispered of creation—of compositions written under burning candlelight, of melodies  played for no one but the night. 

And yet, I had read that Handel’s entire life may have been spent in celibacy, devoted to his  craft, as if love itself had been a distraction too great. 

I stood there for a long time, the ghost of music dissolving into the dim-lit space. In its silence,  something unnamed remained—an echo, a hesitation, a shift. 

That evening, Clemens and I met again. 

“It’s one of my favorite places in London,” he said when I mentioned it. 

A small smile, a flicker of something behind his eyes.

We spoke that night of the lives artists lead—of their devotion, their solitude, and the echoes  they leave behind, long after the last note has faded. 

Between us, a delicate yet irreversible distance settled like an unsung refrain. 

Shadows in the Chandelier 

The night shimmered like something out of a Turner painting, the streets of London blurred in  amber light and shadow. The Royal Opera House stood regal against the sky, its golden  chandeliers glowing like celestial bodies. Inside, the dancers spun and leaped as if defying  gravity, as if time itself could be halted through sheer motion. 

Beside me, Clemens watched in silence. The performance unfolded with an inevitability that  mirrored yearning, separation, and the fleeting. 

For a moment, I turned, catching the glint of his profile under soft glow, his ocean-blue eyes  reflecting something unfathomable. 

Byron would have written about eyes like his—deep as fate, tragic in their knowing. But Clemens turned away before I could name what I saw. 

Outside, the Covent Garden night was thick with mist, as if London itself was holding its breath.  We walked without direction, past shuttered bookshops, small and defiant against the night. 

“It was beautiful,” I murmured. 

“Yes,” he exhaled. “Almost… unbearable.” 

The unbearable beauty of something fleeting. 

The knowledge that some things exist only within the fragile confines of a moment, no matter  how profound, is a testament to the transient yet piercing nature of life. 

Our Last Duet 

We stood watching the sunrise from his terrace—not just at the rooftops and spires but at the  quiet shape of something coming to an end. 

“What is the view like from your apartment in New York?” Clemens asked, his voice quieter  now.

“First Avenue. The East River.” 

“And the Met Opera—is it grander than this?” 

The Met was grand, but the Royal Opera House had felt closer to the soul. In the dark velvet  hush, we had sat side by side, watching something we would never name, in awe and reverence  for the moment. 

But words were no longer our medium. 

Phantom of the Opera was. 

“Say you love me every waking moment, let me take you from your solitude…” Our voices tangled in the air, fragile and boundless at once. 

It would have been too cruel to meet each other’s eyes. 

The words had become too real, their promise too impossible. 

I looked at him then, really looked, and for the first time, I saw it—the unintelligible truth  weighing down on us with all that defied articulation. 

His gaze flickered downward, and in the fragile morning light, I caught the glistening along his  cheekbone. 

He turned away quickly, as if ashamed. As if the act of shedding it had already betrayed too  much. 

But in that moment, I knew. 

He felt it too. 

Not just the impossibility of us, but the loss of something rare. 

And so, for the last time, I let the music fill the space between us. 

Montaigne, Memory, and Letting Go 

The best thing that happened to me this year was meeting Montaigne, my soulmate from the 16th  century (who, by coincidence or fate, was born just one day after me).

I imagine seeing him across centuries, and I would find this short man—without the  conventional stature—incredibly beautiful and charming. He was raised easily, allowing him to  abandon whatever bored him. And yet, as an eight-year-old boy, his mind began to form in the  pages of fairy tales, devouring the Metamorphoses like a prophecy of transformation. Later, he retired to his countryside château, choosing a life free of rigor, surrounded by books,  wine, and the slow, deliberate passage of time. He feared dying on horseback yet approached life  itself as a kind of gentle wandering. 

But it wasn’t his retreat that moved me. It was the way he forgot. 

He claimed to have the worst memorization ability—”a monstrous deficiency.” How blessed and cursed are we both! 

“People with good memories have cluttered minds,” he wrote. “But his brain was so blissfully  empty that nothing could get in the way of common sense. Finally, he easily forgot any slight  pain inflicted on him by others and bore few resentments. In short, he presented himself as  floating through the world on a blanket of benevolent vacancy.” 

We were forced to be awfully honest with each other. Because, as the old saying goes: “Bad memories make bad liars.” 

Maybe that was why Clemens and I never lied. That’s why we felt safe in our conversations and  spent hours weaving grand plans about a château that never was—a dream that allowed us to  believe in something mesmerizing without having to hold it forever. 

Montaigne believed in floating through life, letting memory slip away rather than tethering  oneself to the past. 

And I wondered then if Clemens, too, was trying to float—if his château was not a place but an  escape. 

And what was I escaping into?

I am in Tango, in Chekhov’s monologues, the Knowledge Project, and magical realism. The art,  the music, and the intellectual pursuits we wove between us like a fragile shield against reality. 

Maybe it was never meant to be remembered in perfect clarity. 

Maybe it was only meant to exist exactly as it was. 

But memory has its own agenda. 

It decides what to keep. What to bury. And what to bring back years later when you least expect  it. 

Like Proust’s madeleine dissolving in tea, memory stirs, unearthing a world long forgotten. 

Perhaps, years from now, I will be walking down First Avenue, and something—a faint strain of  music drifting from an open window, the scent of cologne on a stranger’s scarf, the flicker of  candlelight in a private club’s window—will bring it all back. 

For a moment, I will see him just ahead of me— Clemens, wandering the Upper East Side in a  well-cut coat, his hands in his pockets, at a crosswalk waiting for me to catch up. The city will  move around him, indifferent, unaware. And just as I reach for him, just as I think he will turn,  the light will change, and he will fade into the rhythm of the street. 

And yet, I will know he was there. If only for a moment. If only in the way memory folds into  the present when we least expect it. 

Perhaps this is what we had been all along: two people who collided in perfect harmony destined  not for permanence but for something just as rare—an ephemeral, shimmering truth. 

And maybe that was Montaigne’s final lesson: 

That memory is its own form of escape. 

The beauty of it all was never in remembering, but in the fashion memory chooses to return— softly, unexpectedly, like a phantom appearing for just a moment before slipping into the  concrete of Manhattan.

MemoryAndPlace NewWriting