He looked at her face, inches from his own. He saw the concern in her brow, the trust in her eyes. She trusted him implicitly. She trusted that he would never cross the line. She trusted that his silence was contentment, not agony.

However, the most direct parallel is with the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, whose work is a sustained meditation on the impossibility of love without annihilation. In Árbol de Diana , she writes: “Quiero amarte / pero me da horror lo que deseo” (I want to love you / but I am horrified by what I desire). Here, the “horrible desire” is not merely emotional but existential: to love is to lose the boundaries of the self.

"I don't understand," she said from behind him. Her voice was small now, fragile.