You would need some strange meter, perhaps designed by Kafka, to measure who felt worse now: him or me.

The dial, if there were a dial on Kafka's meter, would probably register our lives at just about almost identical readings. I tried to tell him to look on the bright side, funny, huh? and things would change, and then I continued listening . . . and listening . . . and listening.

At times his voice became my voice and then we exchanged voices back again. The fears, doubts, and self-tragedies that he spoke of were all things that had haunted me for many years and were shared parts of my darkness, things that I had to conceal to go on living.