Dear Kim,

Thank you for your question.

I won’t give you an answer.

I want to give you a game: chess.

It has fascinated me since childhood.

Not because of the rules, or the battle,

but because of its contradictions.

Black and white.

Mathematics and madness.

Winning by surrendering.

Cold logic, sharpened by intuition.

Ancient, and yet every time: a new beginning.

Entirely mechanical - yet without imagination, dead.

But what struck me most

was this:

you can never truly play it alone.

A queen slides forward.

A pawn is sacrificed.

Every move is a gesture, a form of awareness:

I am here. And I see you.

Black and white.

Eye to eye.

Chess is not a monologue.

It’s a silent dialogue.

A form of address. A form of response.

Yes, you can train on your own.

Mirror yourself, split yourself, sit across from yourself.

But sooner or later, you’ll get entangled in your own logic.

And that is death -

pure logic, without the other.

Playing against yourself

is like endlessly trying to leap over your own shadow.

Every monologue, no matter how brilliant, eventually runs out of breath.

And then the board becomes not a battlefield,

but a grave.

And so it is with life.

It only comes alive through the grace of the other.

I exist because you exist.

That’s where the magic lies - in the game.

Hannah Arendt understood this deeply

when she spoke of das Zwischen,

that wondrous, fragile in-between space

where something new can be born.

Between people.

Not out of repetition. Not out of endings.

But out of encounter.

Out of birth.

Totalitarianism, in any form,

is a world without an in-between.

A system of one voice. One will. One death.

But the human soul longs for conversation.

For chess.

For the space of mutuality.

Just like the chess player,

the human being doesn’t long for the end of the game,

but for the possibility.

The openness.

Every true connection is a new beginning.

Like a first move - not knowing where the game will go,

but knowing this: it only becomes meaningful

when the other responds freely.

So, Kim,

the purpose of true connection isn’t that it gives us something.

It’s that it saves us.

From the spiritual grave of being alone.

It awakens us

through the spontaneous touch of life itself.

As silence turns into a voice.

As a single move stirs the whole board.

Because only in that unexpected response

does life truly begin.

With love,

Coma